CPHSSWCE0400 - Professional Quality of Life: Stress and Burnout Prevention

Course Description

Social work is inherently a helping profession with person-oriented practice. Compassion satisfaction is the fulfillment that someone has as a result of their role as a helper. Often times, this satisfaction comes in small, infrequent doses, while the demands and stress of the helper-role remains constant. Over time, compassion fatigue, or the exhaustion that comes from helping, begins to shift the balance of our professional and personal quality of life.

This course will provide a conceptual framework to understand the occupational stressors faced by professional helpers and insights on how to mobilize resources to promote resiliency. Particular attention will be paid to individual strategies and organizational strategies to mitigate or reduce occupational stressors that can lead to compassion fatigue and burnout.

Target Audience: Intermediate

Course Outline

Course agenda:

Hour 1: Professional quality of life, making sense of stress and coping responses

Hour 2: Personal responses to promote self-care and mitigate burnout

BREAK

Hour 3a: Organizational promotion of and responsiveness to self-care

Hour 3b: Wellness plans and the resiliency ritual

Learner Outcomes

SMART Goals:

• At the end of this workshop, participants will be able to understand factors that contribute to the positive and negative aspects of professional quality of life
• At the end of this workshop, participants will be able to identify their own coping responses to stressors and how they can mobilize their own resources to promote resiliency at work and home.
• When participants return to the workplace, they will be able to implement a self-care plan to promote resilience at work and home.
• When participants return to the workplace, they will be able to evaluate management and supervision practices in light of the risk factors for burnout, and influence change towards a resilient work culture.