by Darla Spence Coffey, PhD, MSW
Darla Spence Coffey
Darla Spence Coffey
In September 2019, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released its consensus report on Integrating Social Care into the Delivery of Health Care: Moving Upstream to Improve the Nation’s Health, a report that emphasizes the need to address the social determinants of health to improve individual, community, and population health. This report represents the best of collaboration, garnering financial support from numerous social work education programs, social work associations, and key philanthropic organizations. The committee that took on the work was distinctly interdisciplinary and so were the resultant recommendations. Throughout the report, social work is both explicitly and implicitly recognized as the profession best equipped to deliver on this promise – and we need to be ready to do so.
Categorized into five main areas, there are 43 specific recommendations that would support the type of structures and processes to address social factors in the delivery of health care. Systemic recommendations, such as service integration, new payment models, and technological solutions, are essential to changing the culture and approach to meeting the needs of whole people and whole communities. However, what most captured my attention, as the leader of the association representing social work education, were the recommendations specific to how we best prepare the next generation of social workers for the roles envisioned by such an integrated system. I’d like to highlight one such recommendation, as an example:
“Schools of social work as well as continuing education programs should use competency-based curricula on social care. In addition to educating students about the social determinants of health and health disparities, the curricula should include information about effective models that integrate social care and health delivery, the interprofessional workforce, technology, and payment models that facilitate implementation and competencies relating to collecting, securing, and using data and technology to facilitate social and health care integration.”
I have no doubt that there are places that are doing a fantastic job of this. And there are other places where I suspect we need to “up our game.” It is simply not enough to claim that social workers have the knowledge and values to bring to the task of attending to whole people and whole communities; we need to be able to back that up by demonstrating our value through the skills we bring to the task.
In my mind, this report, along with the resultant recommendations, is a way to bring visibility to the value of our profession in health care, and we need to be ready to step up to that challenge – in our social work education programs, in our continuing education offerings, and in the kind of workforce training that practicing social workers receive. If you are in a position to influence curricula, continuing education, and/or professional development offerings, please do so. If you are a student or a practicing social worker, use your voice to demand these programs, so you are ready to assume roles in the fastest growing sector of our society.
This report also provides us with an opportunity to expand the notion of health beyond health care. As social workers, we know that housing is health. Climate is health. Financial capability is health. Education is health. Social justice is health. If all social workers could conceive of themselves as working to improve a “slice” of the “health pie,” we could perhaps find a unity of purpose that has evaded us for so long.
Darla Spence Coffey, PhD, MSW, is president and chief executive officer of the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE). CSWE is the national association of schools and programs of social work, representing nearly 800 accredited undergraduate and graduate programs. CSWE’s Commission on Accreditation is recognized by the Council for Higher Education Accreditation as the sole accrediting agency for social work education in this country. Through its many initiatives, activities, and centers, CSWE supports quality social work education and provides opportunities for leadership and professional development, so that social workers play a central role in achieving the profession’s goals of social and economic justice.