While social work is not one of the health professions, it does have a long history of involvement in the health field. Medical social work has been and remains one of the major practice specializations in the profession. Social work practitioners are employed by both inpatient and outpatient medical facilities and provide various services to support and augment the medical disciplines. These services include case-finding, dealing with psychosocial factors that contribute to the development, course and prevention of medical problems, helping facilitate patient compliance with medical care plans, discharge planning and follow-up care. Social workers also practice in psychiatric facilities providing direct care to patients through counseling and psychotherapy, linking patients with relevant community resources and post-discharge relevant community resources and post-discharge follow up care. The importance of the social work profession to the mental health field is evidenced by statistics which show that social workers provide more direct and indirect services to mental health patients than all other mental health professions combined.

While social workers utilize many theories in common with other helping professions for understanding human behavior such as psychodynamic and cognitive theory, the predominate overarching model for social work practice is an ecological-systems model which calls attention to the importance of interactions that people have on a daily basis with the various aspects of their social and physical environments. This model is more of a reciprocal person-environment influence model than one of cause and effect. Such a model guides the social worker to look, for instance, at how Mrs. Jones's cancer diagnosis impacts not only her as a patient but also her family members and her ongoing relationships with them - this having importance for the quality and extent of help and emotional support she can access during her illness. Her illness will inevitably create various kinds of problems for Mrs. Jones and her family that weren't present before the cancer diagnosis which in turn will affect her response to medical treatment and the course of her illness. Social workers are trained to help families handle these problems so as to minimize any negative impact they may have on the patient's medical treatment and ongoing family relationships.

This brief audio clip and the module text only scratch the surface of the profession of social work and its contribution to health care. If you would like further information about the profession and it's involvement in health care you can contact one or more of the organizations/individuals shown at the end of this segment.