Nora OBrien-Suric makes her presentation at CalSWEC's Aging Summit.The Affordable Care Act has opened the door to new opportunities for social workers to apply their knowledge, experience, and skills as part of collaborative teams.
This is great news for those of us who have long advocated for better care coordination as a solution to our nation’s health care crisis. Now, it’s time for social work educators and practitioners to rise to the challenge.
I recently had the honor of presenting on these new opportunities at the California Social Work Education Center’s 2014 Aging Summit: "On the Road: Preparing Social Workers for an Interprofessional Environment". The California Social Work Education Center (CalSWEC) is a state coalition of social work educators and practitioners hosted by the University of California, Berkeley School of Social Welfare. The coalition focuses on child welfare, mental health, and aging.
Social workers have a key role to play in coordinating care, especially for our most vulnerable older adults. So one of the points I stressed to the CalSWEC audience is the importance of carefully observing care coordination models—particularly those that meet the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ triple aim of improved quality of care, better health for the population, and reduced costs—to understand how interdisciplinary teams can work together most effectively.
To make the most of the opportunities before them, social workers must be advocates and leaders for change. They need to better define their “value-added” contributions to improving health outcomes, and they have to be able to make a compelling business case with evidence of how the contributions they make help reduce costs.
If you’re interested in my full presentation, a PDF is available on the John A. Hartford Foundation website.
My presentation drew from two important reports, one that provides useful information on care coordination and a second that focuses on social work and the Affordable Care Act.
The New York Academy of Medicine convened an interdisciplinary group of experts to discuss care coordination and to provide recommendations on how teams can work together to improve health outcomes for older patients. You can download a PDF of the report “Interprofessional Care Coordination: Looking to the Future”.
And the Council on Social Work Education offers a PDF to download of its report, “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010: a Resource Guide for Social Workers”. The guide explains the Affordable Care Act and the opportunities it provides for social workers to be involved in working in collaborative teams to ensure that older patients receive the appropriate and adequate care from hospital to home and to continue to be supported by community-based social service organizations.
The Hartford Foundation and CalSWEC share an interest in both interprofessonal education and linking education to practice. So after the morning presentations at the Aging Summit, it was a privilege to join with the dedicated educators and practitioners who participated in working sessions to review existing curricula and field work, identify gaps, and make recommendations. The recommendations were consolidated into a working action plan for enhanced curricula and field work in order to prepare social workers serving an aging population in an interprofessional environment. I look forward to following their progress.
The new opportunities opening up for social workers in collaborative teams are something that we here at the Hartford Foundation and many of our colleagues in the social work field have advocated and worked for over the years. So it’s crucial that social workers take a leadership role in making care coordination the standard for older adults who desperately need it.
Please take a moment to share in the Comment field what your group is doing to link education to practice and to create interprofessional teams to improve health outcomes for older people. Sharing information and ideas and working closely together, we can help older adults get the care they deserve.