In the healthcare ecosystem, social work plays a significant and diverse role in patient treatment. For social workers, patient support is more than recovery; it’s reconnection, reintegration, and reimagination rolled into one. Yet despite being critical to a healthy ecosystem, social work’s importance is often overlooked, particularly when compared with the work of doctors, nurses, and therapists.
A lack of general knowledge around social work might be to blame for this neglect. Knowledge that’s easy to grasp and easy to remember. Let’s unpack the role of social work in healthcare in more detail.
Social workers: Core Responsibilities
In the simplest terms, social workers do social work. Their holistic approach to support means they look beyond a patient’s immediate physical situation. For a social worker, a patient’s physical health is one piece in a larger puzzle to recovery.
Consider this scene. A patient arrives at the ER, the victim of a car crash. Their injuries mean a lengthy stay in hospital. For the doctors and nurses, the brief is clear: repair the patient’s body. A week passes and no one visits. The staff learn the patient lives in their car, a car now at the wreckers. A social worker is assigned. Using this scene as an example, let’s look at the core responsibilities for social workers.
Assessing patient’s social, emotional, and environmental needs
For doctors and nurses, our patient’s crash injuries are their immediate concern. And often, their only concern. Their work follows a routine sequence: patient admitted, patient healed, patient discharged.
A social worker assesses our patient’s other needs. Their medical history, their employment history, whether they can count on family and friends. No home or recognised support network presents a significant barrier to our patient’s recovery, something a social worker must consider.
Providing counseling and emotional support for patients and families
Illness and injuries are like earthquakes. The damage is never limited to the patient—to the epicenter. Aftershocks happen. Soon the damage toll is felt by everyone emotionally connected to that patient.
Social workers extend their support to include those in immediate contact with a patient. Everything from counseling to using plain language to outline a patient’s treatment plan. Recovery often takes a team effort; think of social workers as the coaches that help lift everyone involved.
Discharge planning, coordination of care, and resource connection
It’s not just the hospital where social workers work their support magic. They support individuals and groups in outpatient care centers, juvenile detention centers, prisons, and nursing homes, to name a few workplaces.
For some, the thought of life after serious illness, injury, or incarceration is scary and overwhelming. A social worker helps by assisting these people with discharge plans, so they can continue getting care (if needed) or get connected with the right financial aid resources and support groups.
The impact of social work
Let’s return to our patient. The assigned social worker has helped organize temporary accommodation for when they are discharged. They’ve also connected the patient with a job agency that specializes in employing people undergoing long-term physical rehabilitation. It’s these steps and extra measures that illustrate why social workers matter.
A social worker’s positive impact extends beyond the patients they support. Enhanced patient well-being means reduced hospital readmissions, which reduces the strain on hospital resources already strained.
Collaboration rules
If there’s a skill that best defines an effective social worker, it’s the ability to collaborate with other healthcare professionals. Social workers are the link that connects a patient to the people and resources needed to recover and thrive. Frequent interactions with their patients allow social workers to identify and engage with the right healthcare professionals for their patient at any given time.
This time spent with patients enables social workers, more so than other healthcare professionals, to advocate for patient-centered care. And not just on a personal level. Senior-level social workers, particularly ones that have completed a Master’s In Social Work, often take roles in government, giving them the chance to shape policy around patient care.
At its core, social work is about improvement. It’s about a patient’s bigger picture, about making the connection between short-term recovery and long-term well-being. Social work considers the entire scope of a patient’s experience, from the physical to the emotional, to the social and financial.
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