Skip to main content

REVIEW article

Front. Rehabil. Sci.
Sec. Strengthening Rehabilitation in Health Systems
Volume 5 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fresc.2024.1348294

Social Work Practice and Outcomes in Rehabilitation: A Scoping Review

Provisionally accepted
  • Institute for Rehabilitation Medicine, Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, Halle (Saale), Germany

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Social work is a long-established profession in health care and rehabilitation. Reviewing the evidence on effects of social work interventions shows inconsistencies, with several studies indicating positive, negative, or no significant effect at all. Against this background, the purpose of this paper is to provide an international overview of the research on social work practice in rehabilitation. Two research questions about the activities performed by social workers in rehabilitation settings and the reported outcomes to evaluate social work interventions were guiding the analysis. A scoping review was conducted in order to identify these activities and reported outcomes. The literature search was carried out in two databases (PubMed, SocINDEX). Additionally, the authors searched manually for literature in rehabilitation science and social work journals. Inclusion criteria encompassed the involvement of social workers and a description of their activities. The context in which social work's practice had to take place was a rehabilitation setting. A total of 2,681 records could be identified by searching the databases, journals, proceedings and reference lists. 66 sources met the predefined inclusion criteria. A majority of the identified activities that social workers perform are case related. Topics that may occur in these case encounters are the social environment of the patient, financial/social security, work-related issues and others. Of particular note are activities such as assessment, counseling and education. When applying the ICF framework, the outcomes are distributed across almost all components with an emphasis on Participation. This review demonstrates that social work has a vital role in the interprofessional rehabilitation team on an international level. However, there is still a need for more research about the effectiveness of social work interventions. We identified internationally common social work core activities/issues and derived a proposal for specific outcomes for future evaluation research.

    Keywords: Social Work, Rehabilitation professionals, Rehabilitation team, rehabilitation outcome, scoping review (Min

    Received: 02 Dec 2023; Accepted: 31 Oct 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Scheiblich, Knoop and Meyer-Feil. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Nadja Scheiblich, Institute for Rehabilitation Medicine, Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, Halle (Saale), Germany

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.