ABSTRACT
The main focus in an emergency room (ER) includes crisis intervention, suicidal risk assessment, and patient safety, and how these interplay with the work as an ER clinician. For a clinical social worker, these are essential tools, which can be utilized throughout one's practice in years to come or in whatever other clinical role is performed in the future. The social worker evaluates, during the assessment and through the psychiatric interview, to determine if there were other stressors involved contributing to the symptoms. So many children arrive to the emergency room with a multitude of family issues, such as lack of communication, bullying, lack of one or both of their parent's involvement, deaths, and history of generational trauma, abuse, and neglect. In addition, both the medical and psychiatric ERs have become, over time, detoxification units, since many of the designated detoxification units have closed down throughout the city over the last 2-3 years.
