Decisions regarding the order of opening multiple high-risk cases: a pilot study in an urban hospital

Decision making is central to social work practice. Decision making has been extensively researched outside of the field of social work. Within the field some work has been done regarding decision making, but much remains to be done. A pilot study was undertaken to describe how hospital social workers decide to open a specific case when they have to choose among multiple high-risk cases and the guidelines for case openings do not dictate a specific choice. The results indicate that social workers in this setting do not view the various established high-risk factors as equally important. Rather, decisions were based on an integration of explicit and implicit high risk factors developed by workers over time.