Dawn Joosten-Hagye currently teaches SOWK 637 Assessing Wellness for Recovery in Integrated Care, SOWK 643 Social Work Practice in Integrated Care, SOWK 612 Assessment and Diagnosis of Mental Disorders, and SOWK 692 Loss, Grief and Bereavement. She has taught numerous practice, research, policy, and theory courses at the Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. Her service and research emphasize Interprofessional Education (IPE) training. She is the lead Social Work Faculty for the GWEP Interprofessional Geriatric Curriculum program at USC, comprised of faculty and students from Social Work, Medicine, Physician Assistant, Psychology, Physical Therapy, Occupational Therapy, Pharmacy, and Dentistry that includes didactic IPE and home visits with older adults in low-income residential settings.
Professor Joosten-Hagye is the lead social work faculty for a virtual multi-university IPE training program of online health and related profession graduate and doctoral students both nationally & internationally. During the COVID-19 pandemic she worked collaboratively with Keck Family Medicine and GWEP partners in the Age Friendly Student Senior Connection program, a program that matched healthcare and related graduate & doctoral students with an older adult for social calls to combat isolation and loneliness.
In 2019, her textbook Social Work Practice with Older Adults: An Evidence-based Approach was released. In 2022 her co-edited textbook Inteprofessional Education and Collaborative Practice: International Approaches at Micro, Meso and Macro levels was released. She is a consulting editor for the Journal of Health and Social Work and Certified Grief Counselor.
Her teaching is informed by her clinical practice. She is a licensed clinical social worker and certified Grief Counselor with 16 years of collaborative team-based experience as a medical social worker for Providence Health Services in acute care, transitional care, sub-acute care, skilled nursing, palliative care and home health care settings. She conducted over 8,000 home health visits. For over 7 years she provided group psychotherapy in inpatient, intensive outpatient, and partial hospitalization behavioral health programs for Providence Mission Hospital. She specializes in evidence-based collaborative practices with adults, older adults and their families/caregivers living with and managing behavioral health, chronic, and life threatening conditions. Her specialties include crisis intervention, chronic disease self-management, end-of-life and advance care planning, Cognitive Behavior Therapy, Motivational Interviewing, Problem Solving Therapy, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Grief Counseling, and Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction.