Last month, Governor Brown of California signed bill AB 456 into law, which will remove some of the barriers in place that prevented social workers from providing services upon graduating with a master’s degree in social work.
Hospital administrators often look at case managers when a patient stay exceeds targets. Length of stay is seen as case management’s responsibility—even though the factors that extend patient stays are often out of their control.
The professional case manager and nonlicensed case manager extender relationship is a valuable partnership. The nonlicensed case manager extender is able to assist the patient and follow the patient’s individualized plan of care with the guidance of the professional case manager.
A case manager in an ICU at a metropolitan hospital with a large tertiary patient population is tasked with decreasing ICU length of stay by increasing transfers from the ICU to the postacute setting, such as long-term care hospitals or acute rehabilitation facilities.
