General Why is Social Work not considered Public Health or Vice Versa?

[fmill019]

Sorry if this seems like a dumb or strange question but for the life of me I can't understand why Social Work which looks at servicing potentially disenfranchised populations, is not considered underneath the umbrella of Public Health/Preventive Medicine?

Is a social worker making sure a patient with dementia takes her pills not apart of preventing a potentially catastrophic situation that could adversely affect the health of the public? And are public health providers who study how to control or slow down the epidemics of community-afflicted diseases such as ebola not doing work that has effect in the social world?

The separating of social workers, from public health is a really strange dichotomy that I really don't understand.

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[niveK7]

Yeah, they are really similar in some ways, and are most often interconnected. That's why there are MSW/MPH programs out there, because both fields really go well with each other. I'm considering doing an MSW/MPH, but we'll see...

 

[HealthResearch]

Public Health is science.
Social Work is not.

 

[GirlHasNoName]

Sorry if this seems like a dumb or strange question but for the life of me I can't understand why Social Work which looks at servicing potentially disenfranchised populations, is not considered underneath the umbrella of Public Health/Preventive Medicine?

Is a social worker making sure a patient with dementia takes her pills not apart of preventing a potentially catastrophic situation that could adversely affect the health of the public? And are public health providers who study how to control or slow down the epidemics of community-afflicted diseases such as ebola not doing work that has effect in the social world?

The separating of social workers, from public health is a really strange dichotomy that I really don't understand.

IMHO, I think social work does not fall under the Public Health umbrella because It mainly focuses on the individual. Individual families/person and their circumstances. Public Health's focus is the population. Using your own example: A social worker would advocate to makes sure an individual person takes their pills for dementia. From the perspective of Public Health, we would advocate a healthy lifestyle (eg. Healthy eating, active living) which are factors that can decrease the risk of dementia later in life. For your other example, public health focuses on the population and control group diseases for an entire community (eg. Issuing travel advisories, messaging to wash hands,etc) It isn't focused on individual families to make sure each person is taking precaution, maybe that's where people in the social work world can come in- to work with individual families to make sure the take precaution. Basically, social worker works with people already in a situation (eg. Already has dementia) while public health tries to prevent that situation from even happening in the first place. (eg. Reduce risk of developing dementia).

Yes, public health and social work do have overlapping components and sometimes it's not as clear cut but I think what I've explained above is the general idea. Also, my background is in PH and not SW. My opinion is strictly from my experience working in the field. Hope it helps clarify.

 

[lord999]

It was an old political argument that became a legal one for social workers. Social work's occupational history comes from both sociology and outgrowths from religious shepherding work (what we today call religious charity), while public health mostly came from other occupational matters relating to urban development (urban sanitation, civil engineering). Due to historical matters (it's better to read the first couple of chapters of Social Transformation of American Medicine), social work made themselves a legal entity for licensure while public health never professionalized in the same way, and to a large extent, most of the professional work was appropriated by medicine where that has not been the case with the tasks associated with social work.
Regardless of any positive feelings one has about public health in terms of professionalization, social work does have an explicit set of professional expectations and regulations that they have to work under.

 

[Croooz]

Not sure if this answers your question but social work is part of the Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service. There are plenty social workers in the USPHS as commissioned officers.

 

[IntriguedStudent]

Social work and public health do have a lot of overlap (which is why people often do dual degree MPH/MSW), but I think the difference between them was summarized well above. Generally speaking, social work is focused on the individual while public health works at the population level.