Promoting Socially Just Healthcare Systems: Social Work’s Contribution to Patient Navigation (1 credit hour)
Program Summary: This course examines patient navigation, a new practice in healthcare designed to help patients navigate complex healthcare systems and overcome treatment barriers. The course promotes patient navigation as a way for social workers to pursue their professional mandate for social justice while also contending that social workers are uniquely qualified to serve as patient navigators due to their professional commitment to social justice and dignity and worth of all persons.
This course is recommended for social workers and is appropriate for beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels of practice. This course is not recommended for NBCC credit.
Course Reading: Promoting Socially Just Healthcare Systems: Social Work’s Contribution to Patient Navigation
Authors: Patricia Louise Desrosiers, Gayle Mallinger, Tonya Bragg-Underwood
Publication: Advances in Social Work
Find the reading at: http://advancesinsocialwork.iupui.edu/index.php/advancesinsocialwork/article/view/18609/20697.
Course Objectives: To enhance professional practice, values, skills, and knowledge by identifying key issues related to the promotion of socially just health care systems through patient navigation.
Learning Objectives: Identify the benefits of patient navigation. Compare patient navigator requirements with social work competencies. Describe the unique qualifications that social workers bring to patient navigation.
Value: Social Justice Ethical Principle: Social workers challenge social injustice. Social workers pursue social change, particularly with and on behalf of vulnerable and oppressed individuals and groups of people. Social workers’ social change efforts are focused primarily on issues of poverty, unemployment, discrimination, and other forms of social injustice. These activities seek to promote sensitivity to and knowledge about oppression and cultural and ethnic diversity. Social workers strive to ensure access to needed information, services, and resources; equality of opportunity; and meaningful participation in decision making for all people. from the NASW Code of Ethics http://www.socialworkers.org/pubs/code/code.asp?print=1&print=1&.
Review our pre-reading study guide.
Free State Social Work, LLC, provider #1235, is approved as an ACE provider to offer social work continuing education by the Association of Social Work Boards (ASWB) Approved Continuing Education (ACE) program. Regulatory boards are the final authority on courses accepted for continuing education credit. ACE provider approval period: 9/6/2021 - 9/6/2024. Social workers completing this course receive 1 continuing education credit.
Free State Social Work has been approved by NBCC as an Approved Continuing Education Provider, ACEP NO. 6605. Programs that do not qualify for NBCC credit are clearly identified. Free State Social Work is solely responsible for all aspects of the programs.
G.M. Rydberg-Cox, MSW, LSCSW is the Continuing Education Director at Free State Social Work and responsible for the development of this course. She received her Masters of Social Work in 1996 from the Jane Addams School of Social Work at the University of Illinois-Chicago and she has over 20 years of experience. She has lived and worked as a social worker in Chicago, Boston, and Kansas City. She currently practices in the area of hospital/medical social work. The reading materials for this course were developed by another organization.