CDMX Social Workers Anchor City's Community Health Model

Mexico City's Ministry of Public Health convened social work professionals from public, educational, and international institutions to strengthen territorial health strategies and professional recognition for the field. The congress reflects a broader national shift toward community-based, home-visit health delivery models as Mexico works to integrate IMSS, ISSSTE, and IMSS-Bienestar under the Universal Health Service.   

Mexico City's Ministry of Public Health inaugurated the second Interinstitutional and Intersectoral Social Work Congress on Sept. 1 at Utopia Cuauhtlicalli, convening health, academic, and civil society institutions under the theme "Networks of Connection with Social Sustainability." The two-day gathering, running through Sept. 2, seeks to share knowledge, strengthen professional profiles, and build lasting ties among social work practitioners across the capital's public health system.

Nadine Gasman, Minister of Public Health of Mexico City, opened the congress by framing the city's strategy around a broader concept of wellbeing. Gasman says the capital government understands health not solely from the standpoint of illness but as the construction and production of wellbeing, reflecting the administration's self-described identity as a "city that produces health." She adds that social workers hold essential knowledge of the social conditions and determinants shaping people's lives, accompanying not only individual patients but also their families and communities, a role she called fundamental to the city's territorial care model.

Mexico City has spent much of 2026 elevating social work from an administrative support function to a coordinating layer within primary care, a shift that tracks a wider national pattern: as the federal government works to merge IMSS, ISSSTE, and IMSS-Bienestar into a single Universal Health Service, the institutions carrying out that integration are leaning on home visits, territorial mapping, and case follow-up, functions that fall squarely within social work's traditional scope, to make the reform operational rather than administrative. The national Health House by House program illustrates the scale of that approach, having logged 22.8 million home-care consultations reaching 10.9 million older adults and people with disabilities between July 2025 and June 2026. Mexico City's own door-to-door programs, including Health that Beats from the Homes and Health in the People's Hands, extend the same logic locally, suggesting federal and capital health authorities are converging on outreach as the connective tissue of a still-fragmented system.

That reliance sits awkwardly against the profession's labor conditions. An estimated 42,000 people work as social workers nationwide, and average reported monthly income stands at MX$2,510 (US$148) for men and MX$6,610 (US$389) for women, among the lowest pay levels reported for any trained occupation in the country. Practitioners interviewed for that reporting describe institutional investment in training and staffing as having failed to keep pace with the responsibilities assigned to the field. The contrast frames this week's congress less as a celebration and more as an attempt to convert political recognition into the institutional backing, funding, and career pathways the profession has so far lacked.

Georgina Volkers, Head of Social Work, IMSS-Bienestar, argues that integrating psychology, nutrition, biomedicine, and social work into single care teams improves outcomes, a staffing model that depends on the kind of cross-institutional coordination Mexico's health unification effort is still working to achieve.

The event drew additional officials from the Ministry of Public Health and from Utopia Cuauhtlicalli, underscoring the breadth of institutional participation without shifting the substance of the two-day agenda: strengthening a workforce that Mexico's health reform increasingly depends on, even as its compensation and institutional standing lag behind that dependence. With credentialing for the Universal Health Service underway and full service coordination targeted for 2027, how the country resolves that gap may determine whether territorial health strategies scale as intended or remain constrained by the workforce carrying them out.