Sixty-nine patients hospitalized for a serious illness and discharged to their own or relative's homes were followed up to learn about patient's posthospital needs; sources of help they received and how well they met these needs; and the extent to which hospital social work targets these needs in the discharge planning process. The patients, who were mostly elderly, had substantial needs for care. The family was the major care provider. Although service provision was limited, the social worker had a pivotal role in linking the patient to community services. This exploratory study points to gaps in the hospital screening and discharge planning process.

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This issue of AFFILIA is devoted to examining the impact of the radical changes in public welfare embodied in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), which was signed into law in 1996. PRWORA created the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program, which replaced Title IV of the Social Security Act, Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC), or welfare as it had come to be called.Title IV, enacted in 1935, created the Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) program and provided for a federal matching grant to states in a joint federal-state program to provide cash assistance to poor children in families without breadwinners. The amount of aid provided by ADC varied from state to state, but payments were always well below the poverty line. Subsequent amendments to Title IV added mothers and then fathers to the supported family unit, and the program was renamed AFDC. Medicaid, created in 1965, paid for health care for welfare participants.A strong current of racism has pervaded the program since its inception. Families of color were always considered even less worthy of assistance than poor White families. In the early days, southern states withheld payments during the months of the cotton harvest. More recently, the pre-PRWORA media barrage created the image that all welfare participants were people of color, especially African Americans. Over the years, the stereotypes originally applied to women of color-that they were lazy, promiscuous, deliberately had children to get more welfare benefits, and stayed on welfare to avoid working-have Guest Editors' Note: A special thanks to our editorial reviewers, who did "yeowoman" service in a tight time frame and to the many authors who submitted manuscripts, only a fraction of which we had room to publish.

Beatrice Saunders, whom everyone calls Bea, has been the inspiration, backbone, guiding light, and den mother behind the publication of Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work. She was always fond of saying that she was not a social worker. But we all remember her talking often and with great respect about Gordon Hamilton, who served as the first editor-in-chief of Social Work (1956)(1957)(1958)(1959)(1960)(1961)(1962), the banner journal of the National Association of Social Workers (NASW). With Gordon to educate her about social work and social workers, Bea became more learned about the profession than are many social workers with advanced degrees.Bea was the director of the NASW Publications Department for more than 25 years. She retired from that post in 1981. When her husband, Dero, followed suit by leaving Forbes magazine the next month, they became the least retired retirees ever. Bea's energy and expertise demanded an outlet. Mary Ann Quaranta, dean of the Fordham University School of Social Service, provided this outlet initially by appointing Bea editorin-residence. At Fordham, Bea developed writing workshops for the faculty that were soon in demand all over the country.

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