Commentaries, Community, Main Stories, Politics, Top Story - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 18:53 - 7 Comments

Don’t stand in the way of evolving social workers

By Sonia Suka

Social Workers are evolving into “care coordinators”, according to the Minister for Community Development, Youth and Sport, Dr Vivian Balakrishnan. By adding, “coordination then means you need to be able to communicate with all the other stakeholders in our society”, Dr Vivian actually meant that social workers are evolving from being case managers, into being care coordinators.

This evolvement of social workers is good, for as long as social workers are going to work as case managers, their focus will be on containing costs, utilisation management, prior authorisation, welfare context, services that are covered and on promoting coordination and communication across disciplines within the organisation. Case management is about social work in the micro level.

When social workers move from being case managers to care coordinators, they move from the micro to the mezzo level; for care coordination is about facilitating access, quality assurance, problem-solving, psychosocial context, covered as well as non-covered services and more importantly promoting coordination of social support services across different organisations and providers.

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