Leveraging COVID-19 Experiences to Prepare for the Future: A Pilot Study with Hospital Social Workers

Social workers in hospital settings transformed their practice to meet the needs of patients, caregivers, and interdisciplinary team members during the COVID-19 pandemic. This included developing telehealth expertise to address patient and family needs, particularly at the end of life. In this pilot study, 10 hospital social workers from one New England tertiary adult medical center participated in a focus group (n = 7) or structured interview (n = 3). Guided by the four constructs of the social ecological model, four major themes emerged from the data highlighting hospital social workers' role situating the needs of patients, families, team members, and themselves in a larger sociopolitical context. These themes included transformative practice and learning, changing roles of the social worker, seeing and understanding the larger social justice context and its impact on patient care, and adapting to telehealth. In this pilot study, authors outline findings that provide formative data that can be useful in informing social work practice and leadership in future pandemics beyond COVID-19 while also addressing the existing inequities in healthcare that were highlighted by this work.