Early Social Service Case Finding for Hospitalized Patients: An Experiment

Abstract

In the delivery of hospital social services, social workers are dependent on doctors for referrals of people who need their help. These referrals are primarily made late in the patient's hospitalization and almost exclu- sively involve need for posthospital planning. This experiment studied whether hospital social workers, when controlling their own early case finding, would select persons with different social needs from those re- ferred under the traditional system. One hundred elderly inpatients were randomly selected at "admission" and referred to social workers for evalua- tion of need for service. An instrument was used by social workers to record social needs. The findings were compared with data on 188 elderly inpatients referred to social workers under the traditional system. It was found that under independent case finding social workers, in addition to reaching patients with posthospital-planning needs, (a) reach signifi- cantly more patients and family members early in the course of hos- pitalization, (b) reach proportionately more private patients, and (c) reach considerably more persons in need of help related to "being ill" or "becoming hospitalized."

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