The social work profession is gaining increasing popularity in hospitals because patients need assistance with understanding the complexity of the American healthcare system. The primary function of this occupation is to solve social issues that result from a medical condition (Gehlert, 2019). Moreover, the evolution of their duties allowed them to include consultation and cognitive-behavioral therapy (Gehlert, 2019). The guiding principles of this field built up over time, allowing to find better healthcare coverage options and receive more emotional support. As discussed in this post, the digitalization age provided broad opportunities for them to conduct online counseling and cybertherapy, which became valuable during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Indeed, the growing number of social workers is now considered an asset because people need guidance about insurance problems. Furthermore, choosing an appropriate plan should be the least important concern for patients with severe illnesses (Gehlert, 2019). Overall, the insight that I gained from this post is that implementing new technologies was essential to minimizing people’s suffering with behavioral issues and mental health issues by providing video consultations for them.
Medical social workers should strive to advocate for patients’ rights to receive healthcare services. This post discusses the negative impact of managed care on people’s ability to access healthcare services. The major insight that I gained from this post was that the lack of interdisciplinary communication prevents social workers from expressing and defending patients’ rights. Indeed, people of this profession are trained to protect patients’ best interests. However, their job is limited by the constraints of managed care adopted in the 1980s (Johnson & Stoner, 2021). Therefore, clinical social workers should raise this problem of injustice and inequality in accessing healthcare services. Furthermore, it is in their power to facilitate collaboration between different disciplines to improve patient care.
References
Gehlert, S. (2019). The conceptual underpinnings of social work in health care. In S. Gehlert & T. Browne (Eds.), Handbook of health social work (3rd ed., pp. 1-19). John Wiley & Sons.
Johnson, K. E., & Stoner, A. M. (2021). Neoliberal managed care and the changing nature of social work practice: Exploring the relationship between authoritarianism and burnout among US social workers. Social Work and Social Sciences Review, 22(2), 7-22.