DOI: 10.1177/0020872805051732 Defining the role of the hospital social worker in Australia

hospital social work continues to be misunderstood. While other disciplines in the hospital are successful in establishing their profes-sional status, social workers have yet to accomplish this. Globerman et al. (1996) found that social workers continue to be concerned with the lack of understanding of the social work role among other medical staff and the possible breaching of boundaries between social work and other disciplines. In order to deal with the threats to social work in the hospital, social workers must clearly define the social work role, document what social workers do well and let administrators know their worth in the hospital setting (Glober-man et al., 1996). (For a complete review of the literature on this topic, see Davis et al., 2004.) In Part 1 (Davis et al., 2004), the authors reported a quantitative study to assess the role of hospital social workers and specific task