SGCMH Social Services

Ste. Genevieve County Memorial Hospital offers patients and their families' access to a clinical social worker who is available to all patients. The social worker acts as a liaison with community agencies, volunteer groups, and a host of other resources.

Patients and their families who need help understanding patient rights and advanced directives can get assistance. Social services also help patients in all areas of mental and psychosocial well-being.

Patients are treated within the context of their environment by helping to remove barriers, including poverty, discrimination, abuse, addiction, physical illness, divorce, loss, unemployment, educational problems, disability, and mental illness, so that they may cope more efficiently and function as healthily as possible.

Also, our Social Worker provides psychosocial support, interventions and assists in the development of coping strategies for patients and their families during a hospitalization. They communicate knowledge about health and illness including grief and loss that will promote active participation and collaboration in their treatment and care.

Services also include:

• Comprehensive Biopsychosocial Assessments
• Crisis Intervention and Emergency Services
• Clinical Social Work interventions, coordination of care, and treatment strategies with a patient and family's medical team that includes Case Managers, Physical and Occupational Therapy, Respiratory Therapy, Pharmacists, Nurses and Physicians
• Empowering patients' self determination, decision making and mobilization to identify and utilize their personal resources
• Being liaisons within the hospital setting and providing advocacy for patients and families
• Supportive counseling and assistance for patients and families to navigate through lifestyle changes related to acute and chronic illnesses.
• Resources and support to pregnant women in need or struggling with mental illness, social, and financial stressors
• Educating patients on depression through prenatal care and postpartum
• Support to parents who have had pregnancy or infant loss

Discharge Planning

Patients can get assistance from a social worker at the hospital to develop and implement an individual plan to ensure your care continues after you leave the hospital. A hospital social worker will be there when help is needed to arrange:

• Nursing home placement
• Rehabilitation
• Hospice care
• In-home community services

Community Resources

Patients can also work with social workers to get detailed knowledge of available resources to help with problems such as:

• Housing
• Legal issues, such as guardianships
• Financial Assistance
• Counseling for depression and anxiety or grief and loss

Megan Ashlock, MSW is our staff social worker and can be reached at 573-883-4465.