Back to Search
Start Over
Assessing The Capacity Of Local Social Services Agencies To Respond To Referrals From Health Care Providers
- Source :
- Health Affairs. 39:679-688
- Publication Year :
- 2020
- Publisher :
- Health Affairs (Project Hope), 2020.
-
Abstract
- Health care providers are increasingly screening low-income patients for social needs and making referrals to social services agencies to assist in resolving them. A major assumption of this approach is that local social services providers have the capacity and resources to help. To explore this assumption, we examined 711,613 requests related to fifty different social needs received from callers to 211 helplines in seven states during 2018. Our analyses focused on the proportion of requests for which referrals could not be made because of low capacity in the social services system. We examined the extent to which the capacity of this system varied by type of social need, ZIP code, and time of year, and we classified social needs in a new typology based on prevalence and system capacity. It is clear that health care's current screening and referral approach is appropriate for some social needs but not others.
- Subjects :
- Typology
medicine.medical_specialty
Referral
business.industry
030503 health policy & services
Health Policy
Public health
Addiction
media_common.quotation_subject
Social Welfare
03 medical and health sciences
0302 clinical medicine
Nursing
Health care
medicine
030212 general & internal medicine
Social determinants of health
0305 other medical science
business
Health policy
media_common
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 15445208 and 02782715
- Volume :
- 39
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Health Affairs
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi...........b72f913e8dc96eae20555370bcd1c471
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2019.01256