ABSTRACT
Some patients requiring medical care wish to continue living at home, so the establishment of a collaborative healthcare system reflecting each community’s characteristics is urgently needed. Medical social workers (MSWs) are one of the professions in this collaborative system. Even though practice guidelines for MSWs include community practice, the main duty of MSWs to date is to support patients at hospital discharge. We, therefore, conduct this literature review to identify desirable MSW’s practice in the community. Based on Japanese studies on MSW's community practice we initially searched, MSW-led interventions were extracted from case reports, and inhibitory factors and promoting factors were extracted from research papers and survey reports. The finding indicates that practice MSWs implemented were “establishment of a collaborative system involves multiple institutions and professionals”, “establishment of a community network that supports patients’ life in the community”, “activation of the community through establishment of opportunities (e.g. gathering places) for residents to interact”, and “promotion for activities in the entire community (e.g., organizing educational classes)”. Data searched were summarized in 4 inhibitory factors and 4 promoting factors, respectively. The inhibitory factors were “activity restrictions due to the rules of institutions MSWs belong to”, “predominance of discharge support in the assigned jobs”, “shortage of allocated workers”, and “ambiguity of job responsibilities unique to MSW”. The promoting factors were “recognition within and outside the hospital, regarding the effectiveness of MSW’s practice”, “promotion of collaboration involving multiple institutions, multiple professionals, and non-professionals in the community”, “meeting the needs of MSW-specific roles”, and “establishment of MSWs' position in the community and their duties inside the hospitals”. As a result, the following points were important to address, which helps establish MSW's community practice: practice that utilizes social workers' perspectives and approaches; building better working environment within the hospital; and establishment of MSW's roles in the community collaboration inside and outside the hospital.