Abstract
The first two parts introduce integrated health care and health and mental health policies. Overviews of population health, health-care financing, and health-care reform are useful primers for those new to health care or without a policy background. Familiarity with health-care financing is critical for social work practitioners and program developers to effectively define their value to health care and align their work with sustainability mechanisms. Particularly noteworthy is the chapter on workforce development needs and trends. While social work academic programs are changing to align with workforce needs, their curriculums have long focused on preparing students for community practice without an emphasis on working as integrated members of interprofessional care teams. As the chapter highlights, several initiatives with institutional and federal funding are underway to address this gap.
The textbook describes how the move toward value-based payment for health-care services opens the door for social work to bring financial value to health care. Readers would benefit from a deeper understanding of obstacles in the way. While promising, social work integration, in practice, often requires organizational culture change, lacks buy-in by health-care leadership, and is hard to sustain due to policies delimited by insurance companies and the scope of interprofessional practice. The textbook skims these issues and neglects to discuss promising Medicare fee-for-service billing opportunities that can help sustain integrated care, such as Chronic Care Management, Behavioral Health Integration, or Health and Behavior Assessment and Intervention codes. While not a panacea, social workers should understand, and be able to leverage, these opportunities when building partnerships with health-care entities.
The third part attends to the practice of integrated health care. While the scope of the social worker’s role on a health-care team is often misunderstood and narrowly defined, the authors make great effort to emphasize the range of roles available in the field. They also articulate the breadth of clinical skills that social workers bring to health care. This book is a welcome contribution to social work education, as social workers continue efforts to establish an equal seat at the table in health care. It is critical that students learn how to articulate what it is they do, so that they can also articulate their value as members of the integrated health-care team. The authors’ case vignettes illustrate what it is like to not only work in health care but also to take part in an integrated team.
The “evidence-based practice” concept is prevalent throughout the book. While practicing from an evidence base is undeniably critical for providers, it is also important to recognize the curative elements of social work practice that have been historically difficult to measure. In addition to discrete clinical skills described in a number of the chapters, social workers bring a relational perspective to their work. Social workers leverage the therapeutic alliance to create new relational experiences and facilitate growth and change. The healing power of the relationship is something that other health professions have struggled to recognize or utilize, making it a unique social work contribution that deserves attention and articulation. When we only talk about evidence that resonates with traditional health-care providers, we risk devaluing some of our most distinctive contributions and perspectives. A feminist approach involves acknowledging the multiple ways of knowing and understanding clients, something that is overlooked in this section of the book. Other weaknesses of the textbook include (1) overlap and repetitiveness of information across chapters and (2) lack of discussion about caregivers’/family members’ roles in integrated health care. Despite these gaps, the textbook is an important contribution and necessary read for those interested in understanding social work in integrated health care.
