Post traumatic stress symptoms in child welfare workers
A recent study found evidence of post-traumatic stress symptoms in child welfare workers in New York City. The study, in the March/April 2009 Child Welfare League of America Children's Voices publication, was conducted by the New York Administration for Children Services in conjunction with the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.The study asked child welfare workers to identify their most distressing work-related event. What they found was that 60% reported “clinically significant post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms.” The study also found that half of that group “continued to experience clinically significant PTSD symptoms an average of 2.15 years later.”
The impact of trauma on child welfare workers
This number is not surprising. I've seen the impact of trauma on close colleagues and friends working in child welfare. And I know the effect firsthand. In addition, I've been part of many conversations with workers about their trauma resulting in sleepless nights, weekends filled with fear and anxiety about cases, and nightmares filled with violence. I've seen individual workers and entire systems traumatized by the death of a child. Many times, child welfare workers have shared with me how their work has intruded into their most private thoughts and relationships.
How to respond to workers experiencing post-traumatic stress symptoms
Given this data, we need to shift the child welfare culture to be more responsive to the needs of workers. The CWLA newsletter described two models of how to respond to trauma exposure reactions and child welfare workers' post-traumatic stress in child welfare agencies.
The resilience alliance project
The Administration for Children Services in New York developed the Resilience Alliance Project. This model provides 12 sessions of prevention intervention focused on building skills associated with optimism and mastery over negative emotion. It also addresses self-care and collaboration. Importantly, effort has targeted supervisors as well as workers. It also includes a component to help supervisors integrate these skills into their supervisory practice.
Peer-led worker support teams
In Connecticut, Dr. Michael Schultz, a colleague of mine at Connecticut's Department of Children and Families, has been coordinating a series of efforts to support child welfare workers with what he refers to as "worker related stress". Mike recognizes that any effective effort to address the impact of the work needs to be broached in a sensitive manner.
Workers are often resistant to discussing worker-related stress or trauma exposure reactions for fear of being perceived as weak and unable to accomplish their work. Child welfare culture embeds these attitudes and they are internalized by workers. Laura van Dernoot Lipsky directly addresses this issue in her book Trauma Stewardship—see April 14 blog entry.
The Department's efforts to sensitively address this issue have included three components:
- Peer-Led Worker Support Teams. The Worker Support Teams reach out to workers involved in critical incidents to provide support.
- Full-day Training. They provide full-day training for workers experiencing work-related stress or trauma symptoms.
- Critical Incident debriefings. After critical incidents, the Department uses staff debriefings to integrate their commitment to child safety, organizational development and worker well-being.
These three components blend attentiveness to the needs of workers, mutual support, organizational dynamics and learning lessons from critical incidents.
Read the entire Children's Voices article HERE.
For more on how to support child welfare workers, check out our e-course on Worker Safety and our Safe & Together Model Training for Supervisors & Managers which coaches leadership to address worker safety issues.by David Mandel