Newly Qualified Workers: Critical Reflection and the Transition to Practice

1. Newly Qualified Workers:Critical Reflection and the Transition to Practice Professor Karen Healy AASWWE Forum, 1-2 October, 2009

2. The “crisis” in care work: The problem of supply • Increasing demand for care services: • Population ageing • Increasing awareness of social need • Increasing expectations re: service quality But… Declining demand for places in caring occupation programs; Elevated turnover in some key fields.

3. The costs of caring • Emotional demands of the work; • The ‘care’ penalty; • Risk for stress and burnout is elevated: Stress occurs when the pressures of your role exceed your capacity to respond to them. • Burnout: Being unable to cope with work (in a state of exhaustion) as a result of chronic work stressors (Lonne, 2003, p. 280). Three components identified by Maslach, these are: emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation and decreased sense of personal accomplishment. Costs of burnout: • Poor service quality • Elevated turnover • Personal costs to the worker

4. Understanding the stressors on workers The contribution of social inequality • Wilkinson and Pickett “The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better.”

5. The working conditions Contributors to job dissatisfaction and increased risk of burnout: • De-valuing of a human services orientation • Unreasonable workloads • Low remuneration • Lack of work life balance

6. From helping to risk management? • As stated by the Department of Child Safety (2007, p. 7) workforce reform document: Historically, these degrees [in social work, human services and behavioural sciences] were well aligned with the underpinning knowledge required to work in the child protection sector. In all cases they contain material relevant to child and family issues which matched respective roles of CSOs [Child Safety Officers]. This role has now changed. The change is not merely been in the form of repositioning the department to a solely statutory child protection focus, but in the specialization of roles and the sophistication of systems and processes essential to working in a high risk, statutory environment. (Department of Child Safety 2007: 7, emphasis added).

7. Challenges to Professional Identity (values and knowledge) • ‘Social Work is a very practical job… [it is] not about being fluent in a theoretical explanation of why they [service users] got into difficulties in the first place’ (Jacqui Smith, Former Minister of State –UK, cited in Green, 2006: 251). • A‘huge cleavage’ is opening up between the systemic and critical frameworks that underpin professional social welfare education and practice on one hand and the expectations and demands of the institutions in which many social welfare professionals practice on the other (Green 2006: 259; Humphrey 2006: 372).

8. Critical Reflection: What is it? Stage 1: Is a structured process designed to “unsettle the fundamental (and dominant) thinking implicit in professional practice in order to see other ways of practising” Fook and Gardner (2007, p. 51). Stage 2: Movement from understanding to action is critical (Fook and Gardner, 2007, p. 123); • Articulation of what has been learnt in stage 1, in terms of a metaphor or other labels. Eg. “Conflict is interesting”, “my best effort is enough”, “things are not always what they seem, I need to look beyond the surface”. • Articulation of how this might translate into action. Some questions include: • How might you use your new assumptions? If you were faced with a similar situations again, how would you react now? What strategies might you use. • Specific strategies, such as: • How would you use your new assumptions • What would your fall back position be if it didn’t work? • Brainstorm a range of ways to respond to the analysis.

9. What CR can’t do! • Address structural inequalities (but… it can enhance awareness of their effects on service users); • Address workplace inequalities and disrespect (but it can provide practitioners with opportunities to articulate and strengthen their frameworks); • “Cause” managers, supervisors or peers be respectful, trustworthy or …. • What other ideas do you have about what CR can’t do?

10. What CR can do CR offers a process and method that: Can enhance trustworthy and supportive relationships in the workplace • Create emotional distance from a situation and, in this way, to reduce its stressful impact; • Create a space for workers to explore the impact of structural disadvantage on themselves and those with whom they work; • Validate the knowledge, values and interpretations newly qualified workers bring to their practice and assist them to construct a contextually relevant professional sense of self

11. Building a contextually relevant “self concept” • Professional self concept – refers to the knowledge, beliefs, values and experiences through which people define themselves in their work role; • It is strongly linked to job satisfaction and workforce retention. • Nursing researcher, Super, and her colleagues, comment: “the degree of satisfaction people attain from work is proportional to the degree to which they have been able to implement self-concepts” (Super, Savickas, & Super, 1996, p. 125)

12. Creating a climate for growth