抄録
Medical social workers have to meet a wide range of needs of patients and their families as citizens and persons involved in the total daily medical care. Especially in transplantation treatment the existence of social workers is indispensable for helping patients with their own decisions for their own benefit from psychological and social viewpoints. In actual team medical care, it is important to promote the medical staff 's further understanding of patients with regard to the advocacy and respect of their own thinking from the standpoint of a third party. The role and importance of social workers in transplantation treatment is discussed, torough a case the authors were involved in, by examining the process of self-decisions by a patient and his family. The actual case here was a patient who, as a citizen, desired a heart transplant after many years of fighting against diastolic cardiomyopathy and succeeded in receiving it in the United States. The importance of medical social workers has not been fully recognized in Japan. As a result there is still a persistent shortsighted view that their role is no more than to exhort and persuade patients in response to their complaints. This paper discusses and tries to define the differences in roles and specialties between transplant coordinators and social workers as the key persons in transplantation treatment on the basis of the actual case and a field report on the actual heart transplant in the United States.
