AOSW Connections

Welcome to the first issue of AOSW Navigator, our new e-newsletter featuring content created for and by AOSW members.

As we all know, the landscape of healthcare in the U.S. today is extremely complicated. It seems like there are weekly shifts in healthcare that one day support and the next threaten the Affordable Care Act and have the potential to throw our system into perpetual chaos.

As sat at my desk in the final week of my role as an oncology social worker, I felt a bit panicky looking at the piles of paper, boxes, books, sticky notes and goodbye gifts. I was leaving my job to take better, more present care of my children and myself. But I was feeling some anticipatory grief at leaving a psychosocial program that I had created and nurtured over for the last six and a half years

I understand the treatment of disease part, but I’m lost at the x-ray and radioactive substances part. But wait! Haven’t we been told our whole lives to stay away from radiation? 3-Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima? And the signs: “DANGER Radiation Risk”? Despite this, our patients come each and every day for radiation treatment. They put their trust in the hands of the physicians, physicists, dosimetrists and radiation therapists. They don a gown, lay down and stay still while a machine whirs and moves around them and delivers high doses of invisible radiation.

Member Spotlight
Craig Pressley, MSW, LCSW, OSW-C
Northwestern Medicine Cancer Center
Warrenville, Illinois

This book is an extremely thorough manual to help anyone understand the diagnosis, treatment and many emotional effects of childhood brain and spinal cord tumors.

Twitterfall, Web-casting, Hash-tagging, Instagramming, Facebook. These new terms of the current digital age are some of the ways we stay connected to what our friends, acquaintances, favorite businesses and professional organizations are doing. This year we will be able to, like never before, bring the AOSW 2015 Annual Conference experience to those unable to attend.