Substance Use of Older Adults in Gerontological Social Work Client Documents

This study describes the substance use of gerontological social work clients and the ways it affects their use and needs for social and healthcare services, as featured in client documents written in the context of assessment of the need for services.

The data consist of gerontological social work client documents of 55 clients from one municipality in Finland. The data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis in two stages. The first stage addressed the question of documenting substance use and the second stage included clients with ongoing substance abuse (N = 15).

Substance use was common among the sampled gerontological social work clients. Only a small number of clients were identified as having harmful substance use, and these clients had complex needs for services and multiple uses of services. However, their service use and needs were rarely documented from the point of substance use, even though problematic substance use had been included in legislation as one criterion for having complex needs. Thus, some of the service professionals seemed to have ignored substance use when assessing the needs of older clients.

There is need to develop social work training to increase the professional knowledge base and identify or bring up matters of substance use when encountering older clients with substance abuse.