Background: A deficit-oriented discourse dominates child protection workforce research with worker distress including burnout and vicarious trauma predominating. Recent Australian research challenges this discourse through new understandings of worker resilience, with potential benefits for service quality and workforce retention, warranting consideration of this alternative lens.
Objective: This Australian longitudinal, qualitative study explored child protection worker perceptions and experiences of resilience to inform understandings of worker resilience, and implications for worker functioning and workforce retention.
Participants and setting: Participants were a purposive sample of 24 front-line child protection workers, in seven locations, from the state-based statutory child protection agency in Queensland, Australia.
Methods: Using semi-structured, in-depth interviews, this longitudinal, qualitative study utilised a reflective approach drawing on participant understandings and experiences. The thematic analysis via NVivo utilized theory informed a priori coding as sensitizing concepts, which was further developed through inductive coding drawing meaning from participant data.
Results and conclusion: With resilient workers maintaining effective practice over extended periods, findings highlighted the importance of reflective practice and relationship-based approaches to well-being and retention. Support for these practice approaches through supervision, peer support, and the organization were significant contributors. Participant-identified influences on resilience informed a relational-reflective framework, which recognizes the significance of reflective practice and the relational context to resilience, and how this is experienced. Given the common deficit-oriented discourse of worker distress in child protection, this study and the framework presented have relevance for workers, managers and organizations by reconceptualizing how resilience can be promoted to further workforce retention.

Current approaches to managing and supporting staff and addressing turnover in child protection predominantly rely on deficit-based models that focus on limitations, shortcomings, and psychopathology. This article explores an alternative approach, drawing on models of resilience, which is an emerging field linked to trauma and adversity. To date, the concept of resilience has seen limited application to staff and employment issues. In child protection, staff typically face a range of adverse and traumatic experiences that have flow-on implications, creating difficulties for staff recruitment and retention and reduced service quality. This article commences with discussion of the multifactorial influences of the troubled state of contemporary child protection systems on staffing problems. Links between these and difficulties with the predominant deficit models are then considered. The article concludes with a discussion of the relevance and utility of resilience models in developing alternative approaches to child protection staffing issues.

As this is a private report, the abstract has not been made visible.

How children and families get access to services and supports is critical to the provision of timely help and protective interventions. In this article, the major findings of the front door policies, processes, and practices used across 25 jurisdictions in developed countries are described and assessed. The use and outcomes of actuarial and consensus-based tools to assess risk of harm are examined, and the systemic limitations of such are explored including the potential for misapplication of the tools. Key issues and trends are identified including the increasing use of practice frameworks used in conjunction with risk assessment tools, the development of culturally safe approaches to practice, and the use of differential response to address relational problems such as service user hostility and referrals to community-based supports. The growing use of public health approaches to prevention was identified along with reform agendas to address the difficult task of building system communication, collaboration, and integration. The need for greater use of community development approaches to mobilize informal support networks for struggling families and communities is proposed. Because there are no “off-the-shelf panaceas” available, the importance of jurisdictions ensuring that system changes are undertaken with consideration of their local context and needs is highlighted by these developments.

Based on recent Australian research, this presentation rebuffs the common deficit-oriented discourse of worker distress and dysfunction in challenging social work contexts, and in so doing, argues the relevance of a relational-reflective model for the development and maintenance of a resilient workforce. Whilst the benefits of relationship-based and reflective approaches have long been identified and promoted in social work practice, this can be challenging in social work contexts such as child welfare, where managerialism, highly emotive content, and exposure to adversity and trauma are prevalent. While there are inherent complexities and adversity in the work, many practitioners even in fields of practice such as child welfare, continue to focus on relational aspects of the work, engage in reflection and maintain high quality and effective practice.
A recent Australian longitudinal qualitative study exploring resilience in child welfare workers provided significant insights regarding the importance of both relationship-based approaches and reflective practice to staff wellbeing and retention. The support for relationship-based and reflective practice approaches through supervision, peer support, and the organisational context were significant contributors to this. Even when client engagement was difficult, using relationally focused approaches was important to workers. The relational-reflective model of resilience presented, offers an alternative to the common discourse of burnout, vicarious trauma, and worker distress and dysfunction, and is offered as a model to instead facilitate the development and maintenance of resilience in practitioners, and workforce retention. Given a discourse of worker distress not only in child welfare but other social work contexts, this study and the model presented have relevance across many fields of practice.