Social Workers, Burnout, and Self-Care:: A Public Health Issue

Social workers have a complex role of providing social services with compassion and empathy while working tirelessly, enduring burnout at some level in their careers. The consequences of burnout can be harmful to workers, the people who they service, their families and careers. This public health issue is impacting social workers globally and is the impetus in exploring burnout to assist social workers with identifying the stressors that can lead to burnout and formulate plans to alleviate stress by using self-care tools. Social workers can use these tools to help prevent future stressors from their involvement in providing services to individuals, families, groups, communities, and organizations. This paper reviews the literature that explores burnout of social workers and provides self-care tools to use in daily practice.