Evaluating Change in Social Work Students’ Skills, Attitudes and Values Related to Interprofessional Collaboration within Integrated Care Settings

Within the context of the Affordable Care Act, our health care delivery system is changing and creating new opportunities to integrate primary care and behavioral health. To prepare social work students to provide effective care within integrated care settings, schools of social work need to design and evaluate didactic and experiential training in interprofessional collaboration and skills such as motivation interviewing.    

 There is a small but growing body of literature suggesting what training social workers need to prepare themselves for practice in integrated care settings, and in what “doses”. Evidence suggests that health professionals, including social workers, can benefit from interprofessional education. It remains challenging to train for, and assess, the acquisition and development of competencies necessary for practice in integrated care settings. Challenges relate to the emerging nature of integrated care settings and variance in levels of integration in field placement sites. Evaluation is also challenging as it relates to the difficulties of assessing skill acquisition and the desired health and behavioral health outcomes. Despite this lack of evidence, academic institutions are attempting to prepare social workers to have the competencies, skills, attitudes, and knowledge necessary to be a successful practitioner on interprofessional teams in primary care practices.  

 This roundtable session will contribute to an emerging dialogue about how to train social work students for practice in integrated care settings and how to evaluate changes in skills, competencies, attitudes, knowledge. The presenters will discuss their work on an innovative behavioral health workforce initiative that plans to train 45 social work students for work with children, adolescents, and transitional aged youth in integrated primary care/behavioral health settings. Two of the presenters will discuss the development and evaluation of specific didactic and experiential seminars. The third presenter will discuss the measures chosen for the purpose of evaluation, including their strengths and limitations. The fourth presenter will discuss the challenges related to placing students in field settings, given the varying levels of integration across settings. The goal of this roundtable is to stimulate discussion about what students need to know and do and how we, as social work educators, can best evaluate our success in preparing them for practice in integrated primary care/behavioral health settings.