Examples of the Role of Social Workers on Medical Specialty Interprofessional Teams

by A. Suzanne Boyd, PhD, MSW, ACSW, FNAP

During the last 20 years there has been an increase in the number of social work professionals who are members of interprofessional teams in a variety of settings. Most notably social workers are interprofessional team members in health care settings both public health and primary health care settings (Tadic, Ashcroft, Brown, & Dahrouge, 2020). Social workers in the subspecialty integrated behavioral health are well-known and deliver interventions such as clinical therapy services, conduct biopsychosocial assessments, and resource identification. The role of social workers on interprofessional teams at large research medical centers or specialty medical centers has received less attention. They often specialize in patient needs related to a medical specialty area.

For example, social workers in the Multiple Sclerosis (MS) specialty area serve on interprofessional teams in MS Research Centers, Clinical MS Pediatric Research Centers or a Veterans Administration Center for Multiple Sclerosis. MS social workers provide an array of services, such as the identification of care needs related to social determinants of health and associated resources, associated clinical services, MS education, and family support services. MS Social Work is a particularly fast-growing field considering as of 2019 more than 1 million persons with MS are living in the United States – more than twice the prior prevalence estimates (Wallin et al., 2019).

While these examples highlight the role of social workers on medical specialty interprofessional teams other specialty areas continue to grow such as veterinary social work, sports social work, and library social work areas.

References

Tadic, V., Ashcroft, R., Brown, J. B., & Dahrouge, S. (2020). The role of social workers in interprofessional primary healthcare teams. Healthcare Policy, 16 (1), 27–42. https://doi.org/10.12927/hcpol.2020.26292

Wallin, M. T. et al. (2019).  The prevalence of MS in the United States: A population-based estimate using health claims. Neurology, 92, e1029-e1040.doi:10.1212/WNL.0000000000007035