Integrated Health Care — What Do Social Workers Contribute?

Social work is a profession based on a value system and a systemic and holistic perspective, which are directly related to the provisions of integrative health care. What Do Social Workers Contribute?

1. Person-in-Environment Perspective. Social workers learn the value of an ecological approach in which a person's well-being and health care decisions must be understood in the larger context of their lives, including their families, communities, and cultures. This includes what has been termed "social determinants of health," a public health approach that basically refers to any nonmedical factors that impact a person's health (Stanhope & Straussner, pp. 3-20).

2. Valuing Social Justice. Social work is unique among the health care professions in that it has an explicit social justice commitment—it is social workers' mission to address inequities based on race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, and disability.

3. The Importance of Interpersonal Relationships. That is the starting point in how social workers deliver care. With the growing focus on evidence-based practices, such as motivational interviewing, there is also a growing recognition of the role of interpersonal client-worker relationship that includes such important skills as how to engage and build trusting relationships with clients (Stanhope & Straussner, pp. 167-180).

4. The education of social workers. The education of social workers should includes foundational courses on human behavior in the social environment, which equip students to understand human development, neuroscience, and mental health diagnosis and how these are shaped by social environments and inequities, while social work practice classes teach students key culturally relevant and evidence-based practices and family, community, and organizational dynamics. These areas of knowledge are applied in field learning where each social work student integrates the theoretical knowledge gained in the classroom to actual practice with individuals and families with behavioral health problems.

Therefore, as S. Lala Straussner added:  "Social workers are making significant contributions to integrated health care—it is time that their contributions to individuals and their families dealing with a multitude of physical and behavioral health problems, to other health care professions, and to society are fully recognized." (More at https://www.socialworktoday.com/archive/MA18p32.shtml)