Tony Lowe has served as coordinator of the Master of Social Work Program at UGA’s Gwinnett Campus for almost two years. He primarily teaches in the school’s social policy sequence and its study-abroad program in Ghana. (Photo by Peter Frey)

After becoming interested in behavioral health, Tony Lowe spent several years working in psychiatric and substance abuse facilities in Georgia, Louisiana and Arkansas. During this time, he witnessed many acts of workplace violence. While the acts themselves weren’t surprising, the targets of those acts were unexpected.

“I saw many acts of client violence targeted toward nurses, social workers and other human service professionals—the very people who were providing the patients with assistance and care,” Lowe said. “These attacks came in the form of verbal threats, assaults and even murder.”

After moving from different human service jobs, Lowe realized that agencies dealt with violent clientele in different ways. Some denied the problem, some minimized it, and others fully acknowledged it and developed crisis prevention programs to protect workers.

“My concerns about frontline practitioners who provide services to potentially violent clients became a huge professional interest,” Lowe said. “I see myself as an advocate for workplace safety to protect the wellbeing of professional social workers and improve care for clients.”

To this end, he has made presentations at local, state, regional and national conferences on this topic.

Before entering the doctoral program at the University of Pittsburgh, Lowe and his wife, Bevely Nash-Lowe, worked in Little Rock, Ark., for Psychiatric Management Corp. Inc., which specializes in providing outpatient services to the serious and persistently mentally ill. Lowe also worked in the Center for Addiction and Evaluation Services at the University of Arkansas Medical Sciences’ department of psychiatry, where he helped provide addiction services to women with small children.

After earning his Ph.D., Lowe, a native of Hogansville, wanted to return to Georgia, his home state, to continue his research and service projects. He continued researching his interest of the wellbeing of social workers after joining the School of Social Work in 2003. Soon thereafter he served as the principal investigator of a national study funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in which he discovered that many social work supervisors reported believing that their agency’s current safety protocol efforts were insufficient.

In a 2007 study published in the Journal of Workplace Behavioral Health, Lowe investigated workplace safety efforts in mental health settings among social workers. The findings revealed the level of compliance with CDC safety prevention policy recommendations in health and social services varied across settings and that disparate management practices may expose some practitioners to more occupational hazards.

“It underscored that social work supervisors and others must become stronger advocates for worker safety,” Lowe said.

Lowe has served as coordinator of the school’s Master of Social Work Program at the Gwinnett Campus for almost two years. He teaches in the school’s social policy sequence and its study-abroad program in Ghana.

In conjunction with his teaching role in the study-broad program, Lowe developed and coordinated the Ghana School Uniform and Resource Project, an annual service project that involves raising funds to purchase school uniforms, school supplies and other resources for needful families and children.

Lowe’s interest in social policy is driven by an awareness that policies determine who, when, where, how much and why an individual or group receives what services.

“I believe that professional social workers must become more formidable as service and safety policy advocates, analysts and policy makers, for the clients we serve and ourselves,” he said.