Amanda McClure, MSW, is a social work manager in Indianapolis, Indiana. She has a variety of experience serving clients in social work directly, as well as in leadership roles. Specializing in the needs of people receiving dialysis, Amanda makes sure patients and staff have what they need to be successful. She received her MSW from Indiana University and her MBA from Indiana Wesleyan University.
MSW Online
Tell me about how you got into social work and what was your journey like to get there?
Amanda McClure
Sure. I always knew I wanted to help people. I didn’t know what that would look like, but I just knew there was a strong desire for me to get involved somehow, whatever helping people looked like. It was just a passion I had. When I got into college, I actually started out in pre-pharmacy. I really liked it, but I kept finding myself gravitating to the patient window where people needed help with things and they had questions. I always wanted to be the person at the window helping versus counting the pills.
So I figured that maybe pharmacy isn’t really what I’m looking for. But then I decided, well, maybe I would be a French teacher because I love French. And I knew if I could teach it, I could still be engaged and have an impact on other people’s lives more directly, more one-on-one. And then I thought, how will that work? Long-term what would I do with it? I wasn’t quite sure how involved I could be with that. I actually had a meeting with a therapist that worked outpatient. My mom knew him from where she worked. And I met with him and just asked all kinds of questions about his job. Like, what was the most satisfying to him? What were the biggest challenges? And just from spending that one hour with him and getting a feel for what his job is like, and social work, just changed my entire outlook. And that’s what just kind of set me on the path to do social work. It fit that niche I wanted.
MSW Online
Where did you decide to go for your social work degree and why did you choose that school?
Amanda McClure
I went to the IU School of Social Work in Indianapolis. I really liked that I could still live here, close to my family. I could still work as an outpatient pharmacy tech and just still kind of keep my roots, but still be in a fabulous program for social work. I got the best of both of them. I went straight from the BSW program into the MSW.
MSW Online
Wonderful. Tell us about your clinical experiences as a student. What areas did you experience and what were they like?
Amanda McClure
Let’s see. I did work as a school support internship. I really liked that, it was just different. It was more of an inner city situation. Lots of diversity there. So I really enjoyed that piece. I worked with the school social worker and did various pieces that I could do within the scope of my internship in helping him and working with the students. I also did my very first internship with the police department’s victim assistance. That was pretty amazing. I really learned a lot in that internship or practicum as we called them. I learned about the various domestic violence, assaults, the various crimes that impact the victims.
MSW Online
Tell me how that looked on a given day.
Amanda McClure
We got to work with the police officers and were called to provide support to victims when it was safe and applicable. Also we would just follow up with victims to see if they had any needs and what we can do to be there for them. It was just phenomenal. I had no idea they had internships like that and you got to see the city. You were paired with another social worker that was employed there and then you get in the car and you’d drive around to different parts of the city. You got to know the city well, which I think is really important as a social worker, you need to know who you’re serving. Where they live, what kind of areas, what are the needs, the strengths, the challenges.
MSW Online
That’s really good advice. Can you talk a little bit more about the benefits of making sure that you’re embedded with what’s going on in the city you serve.
Amanda McClure
Oh, absolutely. To me, without awareness of the environment, it’s hard to understand where a patient or a client or just someone in general, you’re working with is coming from. You have to have at least some understanding of their history, forms of oppression, what is their environment like where they’re coming from, what experiences, beliefs are. If they’re saying there’s a drug issue in the neighborhood, well, what does that mean? What does that look like? What are they having to experience? If there’s unemployment, if there’s just oppression in general, it’s just good to know where they’re coming from so you can truly have an understanding of where to meet them.
MSW Online
That makes sense. Would you mind walking through your career path once you were done with school? What was your first job and how has your career progressed and your specialty areas emerged?
Amanda McClure
As I was finishing up my master’s, I saw a job description looking for social workers at a dialysis company and it just checked every single box of everything I wanted. I started off immediately with the dialysis company and worked for them for several years in Indianapolis. And then I ended up moving to Tennessee for a little while and worked in Mobile Crisis, which I really liked.
MSW Online
Tell us more about mobile crisis.
Amanda McClure
Yes. What we would do is we were an outpost of a mental health service providers. We worked with the police department and members in the community. We would get the call and I would go out and I would assess the situation and make recommendations and connect them to resources.
Also, if we knew somebody was having some mental health issue where they were a threat to themselves, or possibly someone else, I could work with signing the initial commitment papers and then forwarding them to a physician for review. To help keep them safe, I would work with the police department quite a bit. I helped with an offsite reception center so that if a police officer was really having a situation with somebody they had picked up, they can bring them into our off-site center and we could work with the person that was detained right there and assess their mental health needs and what they would need and what the next course of action would be in conjunction with what the police officer needed to do.
MSW Online
Did you get immediate calls as 911 calls came through or was it more non-emergent type of things?
Amanda McClure
It was more non-emergent. We had our own crisis line. It was general crisis response just within the community that we served there in Tennessee. And so they would call in and it could be the victim or not the victim, or the client themselves. It could be someone who had already been the patient or was a patient with the support services, a police officer calling in and saying, “Hey, I’ve got so and so, I’m bringing them in to the center. Do you have somebody available to work with us?” And we did a lot of that. And then the services. So we did a lot of connection as well as intervention.
MSW Online
Are there other areas you worked in before settling into your current role?
Amanda McClure
I worked as a therapist within an EAP, an employee assistance program person with the local hospital. I was the liaison between the hospital and nurse service agency. I helped provide employee information, EAP service information to the hospital members. And then I also did some therapy, outpatient therapy on the side for the hospital members, but just people in the community. And then I also worked a year with them as a director of operations.
MSW Online
How was your daily work different when you were a director than when you were a full time therapist?
Amanda McClure
It was very different because I didn’t do the therapy pieces and the resource and the support pieces with the clients. But I got to see a whole other side of the operations of what we do that the clients don’t see, which kind of what catapulted me to do the MBA. It was just different because it was more employee management, making sure services were in place and set up with resources so that if we do have somebody come in, can we help them? Do we have counselors available? What does our budget look like? Do we have room for improvement? And then we did a lot of the outreach to the community. I would do open houses at the two facilities that I was the DO over and I would invite people in from the community at different service organizations and take them on a tour through our facilities. And I would share with them what we do, what our mission is and just to do that connection piece throughout the community.
MSW Online
Did you enjoy that type of leadership role more than your direct client counseling role?
Amanda McClure
I liked them both, but the more experience I got in the non-business side, the more I wanted to know what the business side was like. Just the whole, why are you telling me to do this? Why does it have to be this way? Yeah. I just really, I enjoy the business side. I never thought I would. I was afraid of business people.
MSW Online
Right? Well, there is like this perception that leadership is heartless, or only worried about the money and really, you realize leadership is just as much about people or business is just as much about people to some extent as direct care is.
Amanda McClure
Absolutely. Absolutely. And the other piece too, is when you’re looking at that, how you communicate that business side to the people, providing the services and receiving the services is just as important. Active in making that bridge go both ways then there’s such a disconnect. And that’s where, again, back to what we were just talking about, people struggle, they don’t know the why. So if they don’t know the why, it doesn’t make sense and they’re less motivated or less connected to what you’re ultimately trying to do.
MSW Online
Tell me about what your current role is and what you say your specialty area is.
Amanda McClure
Sure. Let’s see. Now we just restructured our social work services in the dialysis company I work for so now I’m a social work manager. And before that I was a lead, which has had some similarities to what I’m doing now, but now I’m overseeing the management of some of the social workers. And we focus on what we can do to improve our efficiency and our quality of care to our patients. What does that look like? How do we go about doing that?
And again, we’re working on budgets to make sure the staff stays in place and communicating our expertise and our goals to the rest of the team members that are outside of the social work profession, all working together.
MSW Online
Tell us about how COVID affected your work this year?
Amanda McClure
Probably easier to say how it didn’t! Yeah. Let’s see. Well, first of all, we had to open up COVID clinics and potential exposure clinics. So the normal clinics we would have had just outpatients at that were non-contagious. We’ve had to shift, I guess, is what I’m trying to say. We’ve had to shift patients around so that we have designated COVID clinics to service those patients. With that, you have special staff you have to have in there. The intensity of the workload is a little bit higher. We have social workers that now when they would work with their patients at their own assigned facilities, have to follow those patients with touchpoints periodically to see how the patient’s doing at other clinics. So the social workers are having a little more added onto their plates.
I would say the transportation issues absolutely have the most impact on the social workers, because when somebody is COVID positive or potentially exposed, the normal agency transportation services aren’t equipped to continue transport safely or take the precautions needed. We ended up contracting with a company out of state. And now they have vehicles servicing our area that specialize in COVID clinic transportation.
MSW Online
How many of the patients that are on dialysis rely on that transportation?
Amanda McClure
Quite a few.
MSW Online
Are social workers involved in making sure all of the patients who require dialysis are able to continue with their care? Is that part of their role, that despite all the craziness of COVID these patients aren’t missing their dialysis?
Amanda McClure
Exactly. And any other of their psychosocial needs too, but this just made it so much more complicated. It was so rocky because the providers that we had in place, like I said, couldn’t keep up. It smoothed out a little bit, but because of the CARES Act, we’re able to contract and bring people in to help that way, that we pay for the transportation, which normally we can’t do. It’s considered an inducement, but because of the CARES Act, we’re able to pay for it. And then we will get reimbursed through the CARES Act process.
MSW Online
Understood. Well, I’m glad that that exception exists.
Amanda McClure
Yeah.
MSW Online
Because you could probably make a case, these have been long standing clients, we’re not inducing them. We just don’t want them to not get their dialysis because of this, right?
Amanda McClure
Right. Absolutely.
MSW Online
If you were to give any advice to people thinking about going into the social work industry or go into social work education for their careers, what would it be?
Amanda McClure
I would say pick what speaks to you. Doesn’t matter, if the money’s not the issue, if you can pick between something you think you might enjoy that pays a little higher versus something that you’re incredibly passionate about that maybe pays a little lower. I would encourage them to take what they’re passionate about. Do a good job. The money will come. I had a prior professor tell me that. And he was absolutely right. In my opinion, just pick their passion because this job takes a lot out of us. We get to know our customers very well or our clients. So you want to make sure that you’re picking something that you’re passionate about and that you will enjoy throughout the day.
You spend so much of your time working in a profession. Why would you do it if you hate it? Because if you don’t like it, you’re not going to be any good to the people you’re trying to help.
MSW Online
Right. And no amount of money can make up for hating your life 40 hours a week. Thank you so much for talking with me today!
Amanda McClure
Exactly. Right. Thank you!