USC School of Social Work faculty have been making the rounds in our nation’s capital, participating in high-level discussions and sharing their knowledge in areas such as veterans affairs, behavioral health, child welfare and geriatric care.

Dean Marilyn Flynn and Anthony Hassan, director of the USC Center for Innovation and Research on Veterans and Military Families, held a roundtable in Washington, D.C., in cooperation with the Department of Veterans Affairs to discuss establishing a national veterans policy.

The hand-picked group, which included professors Ron Avi Astor, who leads the Department of Defense Education Activity-funded Building Capacity in Military-Connected Schools project, and Suzanne Wenzel, who studies homelessness, drew from universities, governmental agencies, national policy institutes and community-based institutions to examine how best to serve the needs of the growing veteran population. While the VA provides an array of programs and opportunities, one concerted effort has not been established.

“The result is a patchwork of funding streams, administrative authorities, and public-private initiatives whose cumulative direction and impact is difficult to assess and even more challenging to plan,” Flynn said.

Participants agreed it is imperative for the United States to have a coherent vision for how the nation fulfills its obligations to its veterans and any national policy should be comprehensive, encompassing housing, education, employment, disability compensation, and health and mental health services.

“Any veterans policy would need to make every effort to ease the transition from military to civilian life, as well as include family members,” Hassan said. “We, as a country, need to make the delivery of much-needed services to veterans as efficient as possible. The creation of a national policy could be a step in the right direction.”

In another discussion on how to better offer services, Stephen Hydon, clinical professor in field education, represented the school at the White House, where behavioral health leaders were invited to hear from senior officials from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services about the impact of government initiatives on behavioral health services. Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, invited the school to the briefing, which covered childhood trauma and its relationship to mental health disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide among military servicemembers and veterans, and substance abuse among adults who fall below the poverty line.

“The school’s participation in this briefing illustrates how we, along with our students, are involved in the real-world concerns of children and families that will benefit from health reform,” said Marleen Wong, clinical professor and associate dean of field education. “We have important information to share about the needs of underserved populations in the community.”

Hydon saw the briefing as an opportunity to stay current with trends in behavioral health care and explore opportunities for research.

“As field faculty, it’s important to stay connected to our local community-based agencies and to stay up-to-date on best practices for our students,” said Hydon, whose own research deals with vicarious trauma and secondary stress of school teachers and mental health professionals who work with traumatized children.

Janet Schneiderman, research associate professor, also visited Washington, D.C., to advocate for child welfare. In front of the Congressional Social Work Caucus, Schneiderman presented findings from Children at Risk: Optimizing Health in an Era of Reform, a report highlighting critical reforms needed to improve the health of children in the child welfare system.

The report, published by the Social Work Policy Institute of the National Association of Social Workers Foundation in partnership with the School of Social Work and the PolicyLab of The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, outlines recommendations on improving systems of communication and promoting access to health services and continuity of care. Specifically, Schneiderman presented findings from the National Survey on Child and Adolescent Well-Being, a series of longitudinal studies on health problems experienced by children in child welfare systems. She said children’s developmental health and mental health are impacted by these experiences whether they are placed in foster care or remain with their families.

“The population of children involved with the child welfare system is the most medically vulnerable in the United States,” Schneiderman said. “Meeting their health care needs is dependent upon the child welfare and health care systems working together to improve access to primary and specialty pediatric care, partnering with foster caregivers to improve adherence to health care recommendations, and providing all services needed to meet the complicated, chronic health conditions present in this population.”

On the other end of the spectrum, Associate Professor Maria Aranda presented findings in a Congressional briefing from the Institute of Medicine report The Mental Health and Substance Use Workforce for Older Adults: In Whose Hands?, which outlines the need for a workforce appropriately trained to deal with the needs of an aging population.

Because Aranda is the only social worker appointed to the IOM Committee on the Mental Health Workforce for Geriatric Populations with multiple roles as researcher, educator and clinician, the National Association of Social Workers, which sponsored the briefing, invited her to present the committee’s findings.

Aranda said there is a general lack of understanding of who constitutes this group of providers, mainly because of the varying levels of training and education.

“It’s a poorly equipped workforce, one that is cobbled from many different areas that don’t always have the adequate competencies to work with very complex issues,” she said. Those issues for older people include language and cultural barriers, physical health problems that can mask mental health needs, and medication interactions.

The report also calls for a redesign of Medicare and Medicaid payment rules to guarantee coverage of counseling, care management, and other types of mental health and substance use services. As they are now, these reimbursement procedures are a disincentive to providing care because not all services are covered, Aranda said.

“Scientific models of care have proven effective, and we need payment structures to be aligned to make them possible,” she said.

Aranda said educating government officials and leaders in gerontology about the role social workers play in the care of older Americans will help elevate the profession.

“This briefing and report are helping to put social work on the map in terms of articulating what the significance of the profession is,” said Aranda, who noted that social workers are the largest group of mental health providers in the United States. “Social work has been a leading profession in the delivery of services to older adults since the beginning of the history of our profession. Having a social worker at the table at this high level of decision making is crucial.”