School of Medicine, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA.
Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research, Chapel Hill, NC, USA.
Med Care Res Rev. 2024 Oct;81(5):408-416. doi: 10.1177/10775587241257983. Epub 2024 Jun 12.
Behavioral health needs continue rise in the United States and constitute a key driver of health care utilization, costs, and outcomes. Social workers provide a wide range of services across health, behavioral health, and community settings, and while this heterogeneity in practice benefits care delivery, it complicates health workforce analyses. This analysis compares five commonly used national data sources and details similarities and differences in their estimates of the number, type, and practice characteristics of social workers. The analysis suggests that estimates vary significantly between data sets ranging from 282,425 to 1,022,859 social workers; as well as yield different findings of types of social workers in the United States, depending on the data set used. These differences have the potential to shape how researchers and policy makers assess the adequacy of the social work workforce and identify solutions to address the nation's behavioral health and social care needs.
在美国，行为健康需求持续增长，构成了医疗保健利用、成本和结果的关键驱动因素。社会工作者在健康、行为健康和社区环境中提供广泛的服务，虽然这种实践中的异质性有利于提供护理，但也使卫生人力分析变得复杂。本分析比较了五个常用的国家数据源，并详细说明了它们在社会工作者数量、类型和实践特征估计方面的相似点和不同点。分析表明，这些数据集之间的估计差异很大，从 282,425 到 1,022,859 名社会工作者不等；并且根据所使用的数据集，对美国社会工作者的类型也有不同的发现。这些差异有可能影响研究人员和政策制定者评估社会工作者队伍是否充足，并确定解决国家行为健康和社会关怀需求的方法。
