NASW's Supervisory Leaders in Aging: One-year practice change outcomes of an innovative training program for social work supervisors.

Social work supervision addresses professional development, staff support, and management of direct service workers. It is important in aging-services settings because of the impacts of complex and evolving biopsychosocial forces in clients' lives. This article presents findings of the Supervisory Leaders in Aging (SLA) study based on data available one-year post completion. SLA is a 30-hour certificate program for supervisors from aging-services settings addressing best practices in supervision of gerontological practice. The study compares participants' self-assessment of use of supervisory best practices before attending a 3-month workshop series and at two times following graduation. This article reports findings from the analysis of data provided by 114 out of 129 supervisors who completed the program. Participants increased the frequency of use of best practices at both three and 12 months after graduation. These increases were conceptually meaningful and statistically significant among participants who were low users of best practices prior to the program. SLA has led to significant adoption and maintenance of supervisory best practices among participating social work supervisors and especially among those who have not previously adopted routine use of best practices. The interactive small-group learning activities of SLA's educational model should be promoted and the curriculum of best practices should be further refined and tested as SLA is implemented in other communities.

Social Work Gerontological Practice: The Need for Faculty Development in the New Millennium.

There is a pressing need to upgrade the gerontological knowledge and skills of practicing social workers. Geriatrics and gerontology, as specialized fields of knowledge, have not been sufficiently integrated into formal academic training programs. There are major trends in the health care environment which impact on social work education, including technological advances, a shift from inpatient to outpatient and community care settings, increasing diversity of the older population, and client and family participation in decisionmaking. These trends necessitate social work education to emphasize new content areas in gerontology and the development of new skills in clinical, case management, care coordination, and teamwork. A significant obstacle to the preparation of future social workers to deliver the complex services needed by older adults and their families is a serious shortage of social work faculty in gerontology. Sustained and broad initiatives, such as the John A. Hartford Foundation funded Geriatric Social Work Faculty Scholars Program, are needed to develop academic and practice-based faculty in gerontology. This is crucial if social work is to maintain an important service role in the new millennium.