✅ Reviewed for accuracy and relevance by Deanna Cooper Gillingham, RN, CCM, FCM on July 24, 2025.
The CMSA and the CCMC emphasize advocacy as a core component of a case manager’s role. Case managers serve as advocates for their clients by:
- Completing comprehensive assessments to identify the client’s needs and preferences
- Identifying and providing options for necessary services, treatments, and interventions, when available and appropriate
- Ensuring access to healthcare resources that meet individual needs
The case manager’s role as a client advocate stems from the ethical principle of client autonomy. The client’s needs, as the client sees them, are primary. The CM fosters clients’ self-determination by informing them of their options and supporting their decisions. Once the client has made an informed decision, the case manager advocates for the client by speaking on the client’s behalf to ensure his decisions are understood and supported.
Case managers advocate for clients by:
- Promoting a client’s self-determination, autonomy, growth, self-advocacy, and informed and shared decision-making
- Educating other healthcare and service providers in recognizing and respecting clients’ needs, strengths, and goals
- Facilitating client access to necessary and appropriate services while educating the client, caregiver, and support system about resource availability
- Recognizing, preventing, and eliminating disparities in accessing high-quality care
- Promoting optimal client healthcare outcomes as they relate to race, ethnicity, national origin, and migration background; sex and marital status; age, religion, and political belief; physical, mental, or cognitive disability; gender orientation; or other cultural factors
- Advocating for appropriate levels of care, timely and well-coordinated transitions, and allocations of resources to optimize outcomes
- Advocating for the expansion or establishment of services and client-centered changes in organizational and governmental policy
- Addressing the need for a diverse and inclusive workforce to improve social determinants of health and inequities in the healthcare system
- Ensuring a safety culture by engaging in quality improvement initiatives in the workplace
- Encouraging the establishment of client, caregiver, and support system advisory councils to improve client-centered care standards within the organization
- Joining relevant professional organizations in call-to-action campaigns, whenever possible, to improve the quality of care and reduce health disparities
- Balancing fiscal responsibility with advocacy
Content adapted from CCM Certification Made Easy, 4th Edition by Deanna Cooper Gillingham, RN, CCM, FCM (2025) and used with permission from the Case Management Institute. Purchase your copy at CCMCertificationMadeEasy.com
