Stress and burnout for health care professionals have received increasing attention in the literature. Significant administrative, societal and political changes have impacted on the role of workers and the responsibilities they are expected to assume. Most writers suggest that social work is a highly stressful occupation, with stress deriving in particular from role conflict between client advocacy and meeting agency needs. This article reviewed the social work literature with two questions in mind: Are social workers subject to greater stress than other health professionals? What factors contribute to stress and burnout among social workers? We found that most of the literature was either anecdotal or compared social worker stress with general population norms rather than with stress levels of workers in comparable professions. Such empirical research as is available suggests that social workers may experience higher levels of stress and resulting burnout than comparable occupational groups. Factors identified as contributing to stress and burnout included the nature of social work practice, especially tension between philosophy and work demands and the organization of the work environment. There was some evidence that supervision and team support are protective factors.

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This study used a Consensual Qualitative Research methodology to explore the motivations and experiences of young people who utilize the Internet for counselling over other counselling media. Semi-structured online group interviews (focus groups) were conducted with 39 participants from the Kids Help Line, a 24-hour national telephone and counselling service located in Australia. Analysis revealed five domains relevant to the adolescents' motives and experiences and the frequency of categories within and across cases were analyzed to generate and understand themes and patterns. Specific motivators and barriers are identified and discussed, as are implications for practice and continued research.

Kids Help Line is a national service providing free telephone counselling and online counselling to young people in Australia. This study used a naturalistic design and standardized measures to compare outcomes, session impact and therapeutic alliance for samples of 100 young people receiving a single session of telephone counselling and 86 young people receiving a single session of online counselling, provided by Kids Help Line. Results suggested that telephone counselling is associated with better counselling outcomes, higher session impact and stronger counselling alliance when compared with online counselling. The limitations imposed by a naturalistic design require caution in interpretation of the results. However, the pattern of results suggests that there are differences in effectiveness between telephone and online counselling. The most likely explanation is the greater communication efficiency of telephone counselling, which enables more counselling work to be undertaken in the time available. Implications for further development of online counselling are discussed.