Telehealth, friend and foe for health care social work

Abstract

The author describes her experience as a health care social worker with the proliferation of telehealth as the standard medium of intervention with patients since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a practicing health care social worker for more than twenty years, she describes the advent of telehealth, her introduction to it, and current experience in her outpatient practice setting. She delineates the surprising benefits it has provided to patients during the pandemic. She also outlines the threats it poses in the increasingly corporatized US health care environment to social work values and the well-being of social work's focal populations, the vulnerable, oppressed, and those living in poverty. She emphasizes the need for vigilance and advocacy by social workers as the pandemic progresses and recedes.