Spirituality is an essential aspect of a patient's health that can and should be integrated into routine health care. Despite recommendations of accrediting organizations such as the Association of American Medical Colleges, the National Association of Social Workers, and the Association of Professional Chaplains, there is little well defined curriculum focusing on interprofessional spiritual assessment. This article explores one program's use of an interprofessional approach in teaching spiritual assessment to students from medicine, social work, and chaplaincy. Learning objectives were adapted from the Association of American Medical Colleges Medical School Objectives Project. Workshop evaluations show that students can learn key concepts of spirituality and the basics of spiritual assessment while developing an understanding and respect for the role of chaplains, social workers, and physicians.

Across the United States there has been a spate of legislative bills and initiatives that blatantly stigmatize and discriminate against the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community. This study was a cross-sectional, exploratory survey designed to measure the attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors of Tennessee social workers and future social workers toward the LGBT population and toward proposed discriminatory legislation. A 3-way factorial ANOVA investigated the effects of political affiliation, religious affiliation, and social contact on the dependent measures. Significant main effects were found. Self-reported political affiliation was found to be the most important factor predicting LGBT acceptance and LGBT respect among this sample.

Although social workers are frequently part of interdisciplinary teams in health care and community settings, interdisciplinary training is often lacking in social work education ( Berg-Weger & Schneider, 1998 Berg-Weger, M. and Schneider, D. 1998. Interdisciplinary collaboration in social work education. Journal of Social Work Education, 34(1): 1–11. [Google Scholar] ). This article describes a study of the effects of an interdisciplinary community-based experiential course preparing new health care professionals for work as part of interdisciplinary teams. The interdisciplinary curriculum was established for a summer course taught in 2006 by faculty from five disciplines: social work, nutrition, medicine, nursing, and public health. The course, Quality Improvement in Rural Healthcare, which focused on health literacy in people with a diagnosis of diabetes that live in northeast Tennessee, provided a model environment for learning interdisciplinary teamwork. Evaluation of this course found that social work students displayed a statistically significant increase in positive attitude toward interdisciplinary teamwork. Course strengths, weaknesses, obstacles, and opportunities for curriculum improvement are elaborated.

Twenty-three women living with HIV participated in a photovoice-based group research study aimed at increasing their self-esteem, self-efficacy and decreasing depression. The intervention method, photovoice, was specifically chosen to put the power and authority of representing their experiences in the control of the participants. Taking action through sharing their photographs and stories with the public via community exhibits is part of the empowerment process where participants combine a sense of personal control with the ability to actively influence their environment and affect the behavior of others. There was a promising trend on the outcome measures from baseline to posttest moving in the direction expected.

Memphis, Tennessee and its surrounding counties have been profoundly affected by the HIV epidemic. Using a participatory research approach this study identified from a community perspective: 1) the barriers and facilitators for providing support to achieve viral suppression to the most at-risk groups living with HIV in the Memphis Transitional Grant Area and 2) opportunities to strengthen the health care system through the use of community health workers (CHWs) to do outreach and engage with people living with HIV. Themes of barriers include intersectional stigma, HIV criminal laws, abstinence-only sex education, housing, transportation, and limited access to HIV case management and mental health services. Strategies to address these barriers included HIV education to youth in schools and community-wide campaigns, more testing sites, involving faith leaders, funding for housing options, innovative transportation services, rapid start of culturally appropriate HIV medical treatment, intensive case management services, and mental health counseling. Two opportunities to utilize CHWs to address the barriers identified in this geographic area are as policy advocates and as an integrated member of the HIV primary care team. The findings of this study can inform a strategy to build the CHW workforce which may have widespread implications for ending the HIV epidemic in this geographic area and across the United States.