Dr Nina Smyth, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Westminster, was involved in the Healthier Outcomes at Work (HOW) Social Work project, which studied the working conditions and wellbeing of social workers in the UK.
The project consisted of two studies, and the aim of the first study was to gain a thorough understanding of the working conditions and wellbeing of UK social workers. The researchers clearly identified that more work needs to be done to support social worker stress and wellbeing at work.
The project findings revealed that working conditions in the categories of demands, relationships, role, and change were worse than 75-90% of those working in other occupations in the UK. Additionally, demands, control, change, relationships, and peer support were all found to significantly affect the wellbeing of social workers. Over 20% of survey respondents suggested that they were regularly exposed to poor behaviour from service users.
A survey was sent to child and family social workers from seven local authorities in the UK, which was about working conditions, wellbeing, and turnover intentions. There were 676 survey respondents, which demonstrated a 41% response rate, and the researchers also interviewed 19 individual social workers. The project was funded by the Department for Work and Pensions Challenge Fund, which aims to help people with health conditions stay in work. The Principal Investigator of the project was Jermaine Ravalier from Bath Spa University and Dr Smyth was involved as a co-applicant.
Talking about the project, Dr Smyth said: “It's been a fantastic opportunity to work in collaboration with researchers at Bath Spa University and Social Work organisations to co-develop ways of improving wellbeing and working conditions. Although this is an important consideration for all organisations, Social Workers have some of the highest levels of stress and challenging working conditions of all occupations.
“This impacts the individual employee, the wider team and the organisation, and this has a knock-on effect on the service users who are some of the most vulnerable in society. To ensure that Social Workers can support service users to fulfil their best lives, we need to support Social Workers in their challenging and complex roles. The HOW study does just that, we have co-developed, implemented, and started to evaluate an app-based wellbeing intervention; we are excited to continue to work with Social Workers on further development and evaluation of this.”
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