The research project Self-care when dealing with negative consequences in helping professions was initiated and implemented by the Department of Psychology of the Faculty of Arts UPJŠ in Košice and the Department of Social Work FF UPJŠ in Košice participates in it. The project, supported by the Research and Development Support Agency of the Slovak Republic (APVV), is planned for the period 2015-2019. Its basic goal is to verify the relationship between self-care and the negative consequences of performing helping professions, as well as to find out which forms of care and how they can help improve the performance of helping professions, and to create and verify programs based on research-based evidence aimed at overcoming the negative consequences of helping.

The research focuses on empirically finding out which forms of self-care support the adaptive management of demands related to performing helping professions, which forms of negative consequences of performing helping professions can be eliminated by self-care, and which at the same time have a preventive effect against the negative consequences of performing helping professions.

The basic objectives of the project are:

  • Theoretical-methodological analysis of research findings related to self-care among professionals practicing helping professions and negative phenomena during their practice, which is followed by the adaptation of methods.
  • Investigating self-care and the negative consequences of performing helping professions through empirical research in selected types of social care facilities, the analysis of the results of which should contribute to the knowledge of the consequences of performing these professions.
  • Determining the relationship between self-care and the negative consequences of performing helping professions, and in particular determining the predictive power of self-care in relation to the negative consequences of performing helping professions.
  • Preparation and implementation of intervention programs aimed at changing self-care oriented to the selection of activities for intervention programs, as well as the selection of criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of the programs.

So far, no research has been carried out in the Slovak Republic or the Czech Republic to investigate self-care and the correction of negative consequences in people working in helping professions in the social sphere. This problem is also absent on a wider scale, it does not apply only to the practice of helping professions.

In the first stage of the research, in 2015 and 2016, there were:

  • created two instruments related to self-care performed by helping professionals in the social sphere, which are used to find out how they take care of their physical and mental well-being in relation to the work they do,
  • verified appropriate instruments for detecting stress, professional quality of life, secondary traumatization, burnout, job satisfaction, as well as subjective well-being, which to a certain extent have been shown to be adequate for the target population, on the other hand, they need to be modified for the target population of helping professionals, which will be the subject of further research,
  • created a model of performed care, which as important components includes activities performed by individuals and organizations, which lead to activities at the level of personal self-care.

The research was carried out in the first stage on a representative set of helping workers of various professions (N = 760) from all eight regions of the Slovak Republic with the significant support of regional and district labor, social affairs and family offices, as well as the Center for Labor, Social Affairs and Family of the Slovak Republic in a proportional representation of all social care providers, in which workers of various professions participated - social workers, educators, nurses, psychologists, social and special educators, nurses and caregivers, as well as students of helping professions.

The results of research in the area of the consequences of practicing helping professions indicate certain trends: In general self-care, care for physical health appears to be dominant, especially striving for a good figure, weight monitoring and exercise, and striving for personal growth (striving for advancement and striving to pursue one's goals) was also satisfactory. It has been shown that the burnout rate is lower for those helping workers who more often perform self-care activities (sports, healthy lifestyle, health care, efforts to maintain favorable family and work relationships). It points to the fact that burnout can be eliminated with appropriately chosen interventions. The helping workers themselves state that they would welcome more options by which they could reduce the burden related to their helping work, for example in the form of supervision, more regular meetings with the professional public, social-psychological training, relaxation, sports activities or rehabilitation stays.

The majority of workers in institutions of the social sphere (62%) experience ambivalent satisfaction with their work, which is manifested on the one hand as job satisfaction with some components and characteristics of their work (such as the very nature of work, actions of superiors and relations with co-workers), but on the other hand, feelings of job dissatisfaction are linked to the amount of salary, career progression and promotion options, working procedures and conditions used. Overall, only 21% of workers are satisfied with all aspects of their work and 16% are dissatisfied. Compared to other countries – for example North American or Asian – overall job satisfaction is significantly lower. High satisfaction with work, the essence of which is providing support, expressing sympathy and sharing in fate, as well as accompanying the client on the way to solving his problems and life situation, is experienced by 29% of the helping professionals interviewed, but up to 69.25% rate their satisfaction in this area as average and the remaining 1.75% as low.

Helping workers in their statements most often cited the following causes of work stress: working with people, confronting clients' problems, unclear requirements from clients, intrusion of work into private life, administrative burden, time-consuming work, lack of time, lack of support in the work team, responsibility for a child client, trustee, non-acceptance of help from clients, absent feedback on work, low recognition of work results.

Burnout associated with helping others and experiencing feelings of hopelessness and low efficiency of one's work, which, however, is associated with a high workload based on a large number of clients with whom the employee works, reaches an average level among 59.5% of professionals. A positive finding is the fact that 40-56% of respondents report a low burnout rate. A medium level of general burnout was reported by 43% of helping workers, and the presence of a high level of burnout was shown in only 1% of helping professionals. Secondary traumatic stress is reported by 33-50% at an average level, 49.7-67% of interviewees report a low level, depending on the profession and institution. The values ​​related to burnout and secondary traumatic stress are more favorable - compared to research conducted in several countries around the world, the so-called helping fatigue, which is their combination, is experienced by up to 56.25% of helping professionals, while only 43.25% report low helping fatigue. We found that a more intense experience of secondary traumatic stress and burnout is associated with the experience of other negative symptoms, such as a higher level of anxiety and depression, more frequent experience of negative emotions (anger, fear, sadness, guilt) or a pessimistic view of the future.

Based on the investigation of performed self-care, it was clearly demonstrated that social workers pay the most attention to hygiene at work (up to 88% of workers consider this very important) as part of self-care, as they come into contact with clients on a daily basis. In the social component of self-care, social workers also particularly care about creating a good atmosphere at the workplace (more than 90% of social workers interviewed), as well as creating a good atmosphere in relation to their clients (up to 87% of social workers). As part of the research, it was confirmed that medical advice is particularly important for them in the area of ​​self-care (80%). On the other hand, they hardly ever search for information about the possibilities of increasing self-care or further education due to the workload.

Helping workers perform, or would welcome the opportunity to perform, the following activities in order to alleviate the experience of work stress: supervision, more frequent meetings, consultations with colleagues or the professional public, professional lectures, training, internal education, activities aimed at strengthening the collective (teambuilding), social-psychological training, consultations with a psychologist at the workplace, rehabilitation stays, sports activities, relaxation and more vacation days.

On the basis of research carried out among students of helping professions, we can conclude that overall they experience only a moderate level of burnout and stress, and at the same time they experience significantly more and more often positive emotions compared to negative ones. On closer inspection, however, it was found that male and female students - future helping workers - are often not able to control irritation and often do not feel confident in their abilities to handle their personal problems, which ultimately results in experiencing stress.

Conclusion The first stage of the research brought a set of results related to the creation and verification of suitable methods for investigating the phenomena of self-care, the experienced consequences of performing helping professions. The most common negative consequences that workers in these professions have to deal with and that the aforementioned programs will focus on include stress, burnout, fatigue from compassion and helping, or job dissatisfaction. These research outputs form the basis for further research in this area focused mainly on the creation of intervention programs as effective ways of overcoming them. The original output of the project will be intervention programs aimed at supporting such forms of self-care that have been confirmed as effective based on the results of empirical research in 2016. Research focused on the creation and verification of intervention programs will be implemented in 2017 and 2018.

Author: doc. PhDr. Margita Mesárošová, CSc. Head of the APVV project 14-0921 Self-care when dealing with negative consequences in helping professions