Search

Purpose: Social workers navigate systemic stressors while managing self-care amid scant institutional support. The purpose of this systematic review is to critically examine the state of social work intervention research for self-care practices. Methods: This review includes empirical research articles focusing on self-care interventions in social work between 2011 and 2022 (N = 22). Results: All self-care interventions focused on modifying individual behaviors, attitudes, and knowledge. Discussion: Most (83%) research on self-care interventions focused on mindfulness, which tended to be associated with improvements in mindfulness, distress management, and clinical self-efficacy. The remaining interventions tended to be associated with improvements in self-care attitudes, knowledge, practices, and wellness. Conclusion: Structural factors and socioeconomic privilege have been found to be predominant predictors of whether social work students, educators, and practitioners engaged in self-care practices, yet no interventions incorporated structural or institutional variables. Multilevel interventions addressing structural, institutional, and relational determinants of burnout are needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this systematic review is to fill the gap in a critical understanding of peer-reviewed empirical research on self-care practices to identify structural, relational, and individual-level facilitators and barriers to self-care practices in social work. We followed the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analysis for this systematic review of peer-reviewed quantitative and qualitative empirical research articles focusing on self-care in social work among adult social work practitioners and students. Twenty-one articles related to empirical studies of self-care were identified in the systematic review process with samples of social work practitioners (n = 15), social work students (n = 3), and social work educators (n = 3). Social workers engaged in self-care practices are more likely to be healthy, work less, be White, and have higher socioeconomic professional status and privilege, indicating current conceptualizations of self-care may not be accessible and contextually and culturally relevant for many social workers. Overwhelmingly, results indicated social workers reporting greater sociostructural, economic, professional, and physical health privilege engaged in more self-care. No articles directly assessed institutional factors that may drive distress among social workers and clients. Rather, self-care was framed as a personal responsibility without integration of feminized and racialized inequities in a sociopolitical and historical context. Such framings may replicate rather than redress unsustainable inequities experienced by social workers and clients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]