About PIPPAH

Focus on Adolescent Health

The continued evolution of the United States’ health care delivery system requires a new paradigm to ensure healthy outcomes for the nation’s adolescent population. Too often, providing adequate health care to the population has been viewed as intractable, much like adolescent behavior. Promoting a new health perspective in this new millennium has proved to be crucial. As social workers, it is important that we embrace new strategies and promote a public health perspective — health promotion and disease prevention—an asset model, and also that we work to ensure that adolescents and their concerns remain high on the nation’s health agenda.

In October 1996, the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) entered into a five-year cooperative agreement with office of Adolescent Health (OAH) at the Maternal and Child Health Bureau (MCHB), to participate in an exciting public/private initiative. In 2001, this agreement was renewed, to further promote adolescent health. The purpose of this effort is to advance a new adolescent public health agenda in collaboration with several large professional membership organizations, thereby reaching large numbers of people responsible for setting policies, planning, funding, and providing services to teens. We know that social workers are prominent in all these functions, and play a key role in catalyzing the shift to a new paradigm.

Goals of PIPPAH

As part of NASW's strategy to ensure health outcomes for the nation's adolescent population, NASW PIPPAH has several goals. The primary goals are to: increase the level of social work competency in adolescent health, advocate on behalf of adolescents and their families and work together collaboratively with the PIPPAH partners.

To accomplish these goals, NASW/PIPPAH offers the following activities:

• Distribute information by accessing the nationwide network of state and local chapters. NASW PIPPAH will disseminate the Standards for the Practice of Social Work with Adolescents developed by NASW and utilize the NASW NEWS to publicize and promote OAH PIPPAH generated information on adolescent health.
• Foster adolescent-focused education and training in cooperation with the other PIPPAH partners for NASW members and other health professionals.
• Identify and promote social workers with adolescent health research projects and/or best practices.
• Serve as an advocate on behalf of adolescent health by acting as a contact and liaison to NASW chapters, participating in conferences and engaging in interdisciplinary networking to promote the OAH mission and issues identified through the PIPPAH collaborative.

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