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Sarah Gehlert, Christina Andrews, Teri Browne, Establishing the Place of Health Social Work, Health & Social Work, Volume 44, Issue 2, May 2019, Pages 69–71, https://doi.org/10.1093/hsw/hlz011
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Awareness of the unique contributions of social workers in health care has been low historically and remains so today. In a 1980 study, Lister asked providers from 13 different health care professions to identify roles in their work sites and assign those roles to specific professions. None of the roles proffered (for example, counseling, discharge planning) was uniquely assigned to social work. Other sources confirm the ambiguity (Gehlert, 2011).
Although health social work expanded from a primarily practice focus into the realms of research, policy, and management in the ensuing decades, roles within these arenas remained nebulous. The reasons for this lack of definition include the absence of a professional organization to encompass the wide range of health social work roles and arenas, and thus define its functions to other professions and the world at large. Seven specialty organizations, including the American Association of Medical Social Workers, disbanded in 1954 to merge with the newly established National Association of Social Workers. More recent organizations like the Association of Oncology Social Work and the Society for Social Work Leadership in Health Care, while vibrant, represent subgroups of health social workers (that is, oncology social workers and social work leaders, respectively) rather than the whole. Also, Gehlert (2011) has suggested that the failure to define a niche as exclusively its own, while obviating role definition, has allowed health social work to remain viable in a changing health care environment, allowing it the flexibility to deftly assume new roles over time.
