“We All had to Respond to the Pandemic and our Patient Needs”: Social Workers’ Perspectives of Integrated Healthcare Agencies’ Response to COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 global pandemic imposed many challenges to healthcare systems. Integrated health agencies deployed their own strategies to accommodate the drastic changes; however, the perspectives of essential workers in these settings are scant. This study focused on understanding how integrated health agencies responded to the pandemic in its earlier months from the perspectives of social workers providing services in these settings, as they are instrumental to the delivery of behavioral health care. A qualitative study was conducted using constant comparison analysis and the data interpreted from a social constructivist approach. Four main themes emerged: pandemic impact on continuity of service delivery, services, patient interaction, and areas of improvement. Findings from this study can assist in understanding how unique healthcare settings with a systematic coordination of general and behavioral health care responded to the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, and highlights opportunities to improve preparedness for future similar events.

Exploring the Role of Felt Experience and the Autonomic Nervous System in Human Service Interactions

“…While street-level bureaucrats have been "shown to be committed and knowledgeable practitioners struggling to make fair decisions" (Bartels, 2015, p. 26), scholars have long recommended that public servants need to "work with an increasingly diverse population in mind" (Farmbry, 2009, p. xxiii) and find ways to improve public encounters. This is especially true given the number of high-profile cases where interactions between public servants and the public have gone terribly wrong, as well as the emerging challenges like the COVID-19 pandemic (Pandita et al, 2021;Weng et al, 2022), and increasing calls for improved health, gender, racial equity, and environmental justice. Indeed, these situations offer reminders that interactions between the public and public servants are not simply two-dimensional events.…”

“…The need to increase resiliency within human service interactions can be seen daily as the pandemic has put incredible strain on frontline workers, shifted the format of many interactions (Weng et al, 2022), and drawn attention to interactions gone-wrong, such as police shootings, teachers quitting, hospital shortages, unavailable services, and more. Events during this time have spotlighted the ways that racism and white supremacy have created access inequities, procedural fairness and process inequities, as well as quality and outcome inequities (McCandless & Blessett, 2022).…”