Co-Determination of the Profession through Clear Implementation (SA@PV)

A primary care unit ("Primärversorgungseinheit“, PVE) is defined as “… the general and directly accessible first point of contact for all people with health problems within the meaning of comprehensive basic care. Its purpose is to coordinate the care process and ensure holistic and continuous care.” In the sense of this comprehensive basic care, it is a very wide spectrum of outpatient acute and long-term care, counseling, health promotion, and prevention all the way to a “pilot” function.

In order to offer this entire spectrum, close collaboration between various disciplines is crucial: Several physicians, representatives of diverse health professions, and Social Workers cater to the same people. This multidisciplinary teamwork requires documentation that is comprehensible for all professional groups involved. In Austria, the system ICPC2 (International Classification of Primary Care, second edition) is obligatory for all professional groups when it comes to coding.

In January 2020, Social Workers were part of the extended teams in 14 out of a total of 19 PVEs. It can be assumed that a substantial inter-professional knowledge on how to deal with the topic of documentation and evaluation has been established in the regional units since.

Objectives of the project include exploring the status quo of documentation basics for Social Workers as well as further developing them. The changed conditions due to the current
pandemic situation are given sufficient room within the framework of the questions. The development of concrete products as the operational basis for practice is of central importance.