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From January 2001 NASW NEWS Links With Women's Professions Urged
Science and technology could threaten social workers with obsolescence. By John V. O'Neill, MSW, NEWS Staff One effective method of increasing the public policy clout of social work would be to form working collaborative networks with women in other traditionally female professions like nursing, teaching and child care, said King Davis, who delivered the lecture at the ceremony to honor the Ruth Knee/Milton Wittman Health and Mental Health Award winners at the NASW conference in Baltimore in November. Such alliances could be used to raise money, advocate health care, influence public policy and support candidates, said Davis, professor at the University of Texas who once served as Virginia's health commissioner, in his lecture "A Trilogy of Challenges to the Identity of Social Work." The first big challenge to social work is the system that has converted health care into a commodity that is priced, bought and sold in the laissez faire American economy like other goods and services, turning the field and medicine and related professions into businesses that see health services as profit centers, said Davis. In the process, managed care has decreased the demand for traditional social work jobs and skills in health and mental health settings; changed the integral role of social work supervision in practice and education; reduced the allure of private practice and long-term services; and challenged social work education to incorporate more managed care principles and service approaches in the curriculum. The United States spends more of its gross domestic product for health care than other comparable nations, approaching 15 percent, with earlier forecasts of up to 22 percent by 2010, said Davis. Yet all the public policy decisions and efforts to control cost with managed care systems and by shifting risks to businesses, providers and consumers have "increased the overall cost of providing health and mental health care without a substantial increase in the quality of services or beneficial outcomes." There are a variety of efforts at state and federal levels to reduce rising premium costs, to protect patients' rights, to expand services to children, to reduce disparities and extend services to the uninsured, Davis said. There is increased discussion of developing alternative health care policy, such as medical savings accounts and tax relief for health care costs. All these factors underscore the need for what Davis called the second challenge to social work: politics and public policy. It is in this arena, where African Americans and women have traditionally been minimized, that they need to join together to affect public policy, said Davis. He said a number of issues to be considered in the next Congress will affect the form, shape and functioning of social work: Medicaid, Medicare, universal health insurance, racial profiling, Social Security, Social Work Research Center, education, parity in sentencing, use of the surplus, patients' bill of rights, follow-up to the Surgeon General's Report on Mental Health, efforts to resolve disparities in health, immigration, food stamps, the next phase of welfare reform, minimum wage, tax reform and free trade. "The future resides, just as the past did, in public policy and political opportunities," Davis said. The third challenge to social work is science and technology — developments in biogenetic and biomedical research and exploration of the genome and human brain that have changed the way disease is conceptualized and understood. In some biomedical areas there is talk about care and primary prevention like never before, he said. "It is not unrealistic to consider that the future will increasingly be characterized by the pursuit and application of new hypotheses that will alter the base of professional practice." Among questions social work faces, said Davis, are: how to build on and interface with science and technology to avoid obsolescence; how to change service methods to include greater technology while maintaining traditional values, the ethical base and commitment to social justice; and how to increase technology and biogenetic information in curricula. Davis then listed strategies that social work can take to convert its greatest challenges into opportunities. Among them:
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