Latest posts
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Kayla Bonkowski | What Burnout Looks Like in Healthcare Social Workers
Burnout in healthcare social work does not always look like collapse. It can look like a social worker who is technically performing every required function but is no longer actually present with the people they serve. It can look like a practitioner who processes grief efficiently — the family is referred, the paperwork is filed,…
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Kayla Bonkowski | The Case for Bringing Social Work Into Palliative Care Earlier
Most families meet the palliative care social worker late. By the time the introduction happens, the family is often already in crisis — the diagnosis has been sitting for weeks or months, decisions have been made without adequate support, and the relational damage from navigating those decisions without a skilled guide has already accumulated. Kayla…
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Kayla Bonkowski | What End-of-Life Planning Actually Looks Like
End-of-life planning is not a single conversation about final wishes. It is an ongoing process involving legal instruments, financial decisions, family communication, and medical guidance that most people approach too late, in too much distress, with too little information. Kayla Bonkowski, a social work graduate student in Sterling Heights, Michigan, is training for a specialty…
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Kayla Bonkowski | Why Anticipatory Grief Deserves Its Own Name
Grief has a clinical definition. It is the response to loss. What the standard definition misses is that loss begins before the death does. Kayla Bonkowski, a social work graduate student in Sterling Heights, Michigan, works within a specialty — hospice and palliative care — where the grief a family carries before a death is…
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Kayla Bonkowski | The Difference Between a Therapist and a Social Worker
Both professions involve extended conversations with people who are struggling. The training, scope, and underlying framework are different enough that treating the terms as interchangeable leads to real confusion about what each can offer. Kayla Bonkowski, a social work graduate student in Sterling Heights, Michigan, thinks the distinction deserves a plain explanation. A therapist —…
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Kayla Bonkowski | What Social Workers Actually Do in Medical Settings
Medical social workers operate in hospital rooms, discharge planning meetings, and family conferences. Most patients meet one at a moment of crisis, which is not the ideal introduction to what the role covers. Kayla Bonkowski, a social work graduate student in Sterling Heights, Michigan, has spent time inside these systems through her academic training and…
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Kayla Bonkowski | What Happens to a Family When Someone Is Dying
Terminal illness does not only affect the patient. It reorganizes the entire family system — and the social worker steps into that reorganization. Terminal illness does not arrive cleanly. It arrives into a household that already has its own structure, its own history, and its own long-standing patterns for how the people inside it relate…
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Kayla Bonkowski | When Fitness Becomes a Mental Health Practice
The research on exercise and mental health is more specific than the general claim suggests. The specifics make it more useful. The claim that exercise is good for mental health is repeated often enough to have become background noise. It is also true, and the research behind it is more specific and more useful than…
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Kayla Bonkowski | What Palliative Care Is — and Why It Is Not the Same as Hospice
The two terms are used interchangeably. They refer to different things. The difference determines what a patient can access and when. Hospice and palliative care are not the same thing. They are used interchangeably in most conversations about serious illness. That confusion is not trivial. It determines what patients access, when they access it, and…
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Kayla Bonkowski | The Case for Combining Psychology and Social Work
The two fields approach human experience from different directions. The overlap between them is where the strongest clinical work happens. Psychology and social work are not substitutes for each other. They cover adjacent territory from different angles. A psychology background without social work training produces clinical understanding with limited tools for real-world intervention. A social…