Social work services in home health care: challenges for the new prospective payment system era

The implementation of the Prospective Payment System (PPS) provides a unique opportunity for social workers to be better integrated into home health care. To do so, it is important for social workers to define their roles and eliminate any barriers to providing social workers services, which may improve patient outcomes. Two focus groups with home health nurses (n = 10) and social workers (n = 8) were conducted in a large urban home health agency to define social work roles and identify barriers to providing social work services. This paper categorizes the barriers to providing social work services into informational, systems/organizational, and inter-professional barriers and presents possible solutions to these barriers as home health agencies strive to provide care under PPS.