Social work plays a critical role in preventive health and mitigation of healthcare disparities, but few studies focus on its role in multi-specialty clinics serving marginalized populations. We aimed to characterize the role of outpatient neurology social work at an urban, safety-net hospital. In December 2021, we introduced a dedicated social worker to a neurology clinic primarily caring for an underserved patient population. We logged and characterized the first 200 consecutive hours of patient encounters, classifying interventions based on a recently popularized 10-category scheme in social work literature derived from natural language processing and machine learning algorithms. We characterized 125 encounters with neurology patients referred to social work. The neurology social worker spent the greatest amount of time on care coordination (40%), followed by housing insecurity (14%) and applications and reporting (11%). Interventions that required the most time per case included housing (129 min), applications and reporting (120 min), care coordination (96 min). The majority of interventions were directly related to the patient’s underlying neurologic disorder, highlighting the importance of a neurology-specific social worker. Embedding a social worker in a multi-specialty neurology clinic may address many of the root causes of neurologic health disparities.

社会工作在预防健康和缓解医疗保健差异方面发挥着至关重要的作用，但很少有研究关注其在为边缘人群提供服务的多专业诊所中的作用。我们的目的是描述门诊神经科社会工作在城市安全网医院中的作用。2021 年 12 月，我们向一家神经科诊所介绍了一名专门的社会工作者，主要照顾服务不足的患者群体。我们记录并描述了前 200 个连续小时的患者接触情况，并根据社会工作文献中最近流行的 10 类方案对干预措施进行分类，该方案源自自然语言处理和机器学习算法。我们对 125 例转介给社会工作的神经病患者进行了描述。神经科社会工作者在护理协调上花费的时间最多（40%），其次是住房不安全（14%）以及申请和报告（11%）。每个病例需要最多时间的干预措施包括住房（129 分钟）、申请和报告（120 分钟）、护理协调（96 分钟）。大多数干预措施与患者潜在的神经系统疾病直接相关，凸显了神经病学专业社会工作者的重要性。在多专业神经病学诊所中安置一名社会工作者可能会解决神经系统健康差异的许多根本原因。