Social work practice with older persons in acute care settings: A narrative review of social workers’ roles as advocates for older persons’ rights
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006) suggests that all individuals have the right to participate in decisions about their care. This rights-based framework calls on healthcare professionals such as social workers to prioritize older persons’ rights to participate in care decisions that affect them. Hence, this review examines how social workers in acute care settings are positioned to act as advocates. We conducted a narrative review of literature using five scientific databases—CINAHL, MEDLINE, PubMed, Social Work Abstracts, and Social Sciences Abstracts, and one search engine, Google Scholar. Of 83 articles identified, 26 were selected for full-text review. We performed a thematic analysis to examine how and when social workers advocate for older persons’ rights. Of 26 articles reviewed, 18 included perspectives of interprofessional team members. Thematic analysis revealed three main roles of social workers in acute care: coordinator, mediator, and advocate. While coordinating and mediating roles were widely recognized and valued as they prioritize system efficiency and service navigation, advocacy aimed at promoting older persons’ rights was less visible and harder to enact. Social workers face many challenges in acting as advocates because they are most valued within hospital settings for their roles as coordinators and mediators. Further research is needed to identify how social workers can consistently prioritize their role as advocates. Without these guidelines, older persons’ right to care involvement will not be realized and rights claims will continue to be sidelined by the rhetoric of efficiency and risk protection.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.033 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".