Hi Kella-- I am not sure if this is the same immediacy that your professor is talking about, but when I do group therapy at the inpatient hospital there is something that we refer to as "taking care of immediacy needs." This comes up a lot when there are three thousand things going on in group. Here is an example:

I am doing group therapy and there are about 15 people in the group. There is a pretty in depth discussion taking place about fear. I notice that one of my patients looks uncomfortable. I ask what is going on and he tells me that he is hearing voices and they are scaring him. The person no longer feels comfortable in the room and he is very afraid. I ask the group to feel free to continue to the discussion, but to please carry on for a moment without me. I take the scared patient aside and do whatever I need to do to help him feel safe again and to help orient him to reality.

That is what we call taking care of immediacy needs-- even though something was going on in the group, taking care of the scared patient became an immediacy need-- I had to assess what was most important to attend to at that moment. Although what was going in group was very important there was something even more significant in the moment that required immediate attention.

Simiarly you can teach a patient about taking care of immediacy needs-- sort of like prioritizing-- for example.... the patient needs to do a couple things today-- pick up her medication, pick up her dry cleaning, and go to the post office-- but she only has time and/or money to do one of these things.... so if the patient was taking care of immediacy needs then she would pick up her medication and do the rest of the stuff another time.

I hope that helped.