![]() ![]() They work to enhance the availability of community-based resources (e.g., healthcare clinics in low-income neighborhoods or residential programs for children with AIDS), advocate on behalf of individual patients who are in need of services, and advocate to ensure that important public policy issues related to healthcare are addressed (e.g., funding for lead screening or guidelines concerning involuntary commitment of mentally ill individuals to psychiatric hospitals). Social workers are also skilled in organizing and facilitating support groups for various populations, such as cancer patients, rape victims, and parents of seriously impaired infants. Many social workers in healthcare settings provide patients and their families with counseling, and information about and referral to needed resources (e.g., home healthcare, financial assistance, nursing home placement). Social workers' specialized role is to help patients and their families cope with illness and disability. These opportunities exist in hospitals, neighborhood health and family planning clinics, psychiatric institutions, community mental-health centers, nursing homes, rehabilitation centers, and other long-term care facilities. ![]() In addition to assisting hospitalized patients and their families, social workers provide genetic counseling, hospice services, psychotherapy and counseling in mental-health agencies, and treatment of people with eating disorders and substance abuse problems. Over time, social work's function and influence in healthcare settings have expanded significantly (Miller and Rehr). Under the direction of their first department head, Ida Cannon, these social workers helped patients and their families cope with illness, disease, disability, and hospitalization by focusing particularly on their psychosocial needs, including their emotional reaction and adaptation (Rossen). Cabot, a professor of both clinical medicine and social ethics at Harvard University, was instrumental in adding social workers to his clinic staff at Massachusetts General Hospital. Social work was introduced to medical settings in the United States by Dr. ![]() Social workers have played a vital role in healthcare settings since the early twentieth century. ![]()
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