Research, Practice, and Policy Strategies to Ensure Healthy Development for All Youths.

Abstract

The Grand Challenges for Social Work introduced by the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare (AASWSW) bring a variety of opportunities for advancement throughout health social work fields. Although each challenge addresses a unique large-scale aim for the profession, they are all able to inform aspects of health and related social work roles across varied levels of practice. The challenge to ensure healthy development for all youths is rooted in essential primary health care through which family-centered prevention efforts can be introduced and implemented (AASWSW, 2017). From this perspective, health care settings afford several advantages and are therefore well suited to ensure healthy development. Fundamentally, primary health care settings are able to reach a sizable portion of the population inclusive of diverse socioeconomic factors starting in infancy and continuing through the life span (AASWSW, 2017; Leslie et al., 2016). Initial positive connections forged between families and health care providers can help to establish a basis for ongoing involvement with primary care services while opening the door to a range of prevention programs (Leslie et al., 2016). Early engagement in health care settings has been shown to increase the likelihood of parents and children participating in family-centered prevention programs throughout development (AASWSW, 2017; Piotrowski, Talavera, & Mayer, 2009). Prevention programs of this nature have resulted in positive outcomes among a host of health and behavior indicators for children (Hawkins et al., 2015; Leslie et al., 2016), beneficial effects on parenting (Berge, Law, Johnson, & Wells, 2010; Perrin, Sheldrick, McMenamy, Henson, & Carter, 2014), and implications for the improvement of broader population health (Morris et al., 2017; Patlak, 2014).