Frontline action by health services and social services and their professionals in times of pandemic

Abstract

The outbreak of COVID-19 disease declared as a pandemic has affected populations in all countries of the world, although to varying degrees and with different implications for the social well-being and health of certain vulnerable groups. The institutional response to the pandemic has highlighted the importance of strengthening the performance of essential services in a crisis situation and of adopting intersectoral measures to treat or reduce their associated damage, beyond seeking only biomedical solutions aimed at preventing or curbing their impact. This paper presents a theoretical review of the first line action that health services and social services and their professionals have played as essential services, highlighting the role played by social work in them in times of pandemic. The purpose is to assess in a global and integral way as its main role and functions of promotion, prevention and social and health care (at the micro, meso and macro levels) they contribute to ensuring the social and health rights of the most devalued and unprotected populations through care practices focused on people’s needs from a multidimensional perspective at the micro, meso and macro levels. The pandemic has shown, once again, how front-line professional action must be adapted and transformed into innovative and creative practices committed to social justice and the human rights of the most vulnerable populations, and in the context of health and social services, already dismantled and overburdened, in emergency situations and heightened vulnerability.