Hazards of Our Helping Profession: A Practical Self-Care Model for Community Practice

Abstract

The social work profession is a helping profession; social workers provide services with the intent to improve life opportunities in pursuit of social justice for individuals, groups, communities, and society as a whole. Social workers are called to work on behalf of the most vulnerable people in our society, and as such, the hazards of our helping profession are abundant. Though the literature offers numerous frameworks that can be used by social workers in a variety of settings, many issues that are unique to community practice settings can lead to professional burnout and compassion fatigue for social workers. At present there are no comprehensive models for self-care that attend specifically to the unique needs of the community practitioner. This article presents the iM-PAACT model, a four-part conceptual framework that helps to fill this gap in the literature. This practical self-care model has been designed specifically for social workers engaged primarily in community practice settings, including the community activist, community organizer, and community-engaged scholar.

A Case Study Exploration into the Benefits of Teaching Self-Care to School Psychology Graduate Students

“…Next, participants engaged in self-study with the goal of creating a plan with strategies that they could apply for selfcare. Creation of a written plan to address stress through selfcare that is revised over a period of time is consistent with theoretical models of self-care (Brown 2019) and parallels coping skill training as proposed by McNamara (2000). A series of readings and websites were provided to participants (see Table 1 for a list) to help them to generate ideas about how to structure and design a self-care plan.…”

“…Once the participant response database was compiled, the analysis strategy for these data sources was developed based on recommendations for case study research by Yin (2018) and Creswell and Poth (2018). In general, a pattern matching approach was used to analyze the participant responses based on the iM-PAACT model (Brown 2019) and transactional model of coping (Lazarus and Folkman 1984;McNamara 2000). Yin described pattern matching as a technique in case study research involving searching for patterns in the data predicted by theory or prior research.…”

“…The transactional model of coping emphasizes active application of coping in response to appraisals of stressful events (Lazarus and Folkman 1984), and intervention in coping skills emphasizes application of problem-focused strategies and reducing use of avoidancefocused strategies (McNamara 2000). The thriving state of self-care suggested by iM-PAACT model predicts that this coping approach can be developed through promoting the prioritization of self-care, developing and evaluating a plan, and connecting internally to self-care and externally to others (Brown 2019).…”

“…These raw responses were compiled into a single document in Microsoft Word. After compilation, participant responses were read by the primary author twice to identify excerpts of the response that could be relevant to understanding the responses of the participants based on the stages proposed by the iM-PAACT model (Brown 2019). These excerpts were then extracted into a separate research database in Microsoft Excel, thus providing a clear chain of evidence for the qualitative data to be analyzed.…”

“…Based on Yin's (2018) recommendations, the analysis of the qualitative data followed an iterative process. The authors started the process with a conceptual model for stress and self-care, specifically the transactional model of coping (Lazarus and Folkman 1984;McNamara 2000) and the iM-PAACT framework (Brown 2019). The analysis started at a broad level through an initial reading of all responses in the response database, followed by a closer reading at the element level within responses to examine for information that matched patterns predicted by theory and might yield the explanatory information needed to respond to the research questions.…”