In October, the CoSW announced yet another global partnership to continue its work examining the self-care and wellness practices of helping professionals around the world within their Self-Care Lab (SCL).
This new partnership, which now includes researchers from the University of Bucharest, adds to the already growing list of established formal research partnerships within the Global Self-Care Initiative, with investigators and academic institutions in Russia, Slovakia, Spain, Finland, Ethiopia, and Finland, to name a few. This new research will examine cultural nuances in self-care practices among social workers in Romania.
“Self-care is a concept that has no geographical boundaries. These types of partnerships allow for a more robust examination of self-care practices and it deepens our understanding of how to support helping professionals to engage in these practices” explained College of Social Work Dean Jay Miller.
The Global Self-Care Initiative is part of a bigger picture at the CoSW. In Spring 2018, CoSW received a grant to launch the SCL. The SCL, which officially opened its doors on June 1, 2018, is specifically dedicated to empirically investigating self-care among helping professionals, with broad ranging self-care research and education among social workers, educators, nurses, law enforcement and other helping professionals. In doing so, the lab seeks to address potentially toxic employment conditions.
“We care about helping professionals and we care about the populations they help. We want to support them in providing the best professional service possible,” Miller said. “We can do that through rigorous clinical research and innovation related to self-care.”
Among a host of practice interventions and clinical trials, the SCL affords students, faculty and staff from across campus the opportunity to engage in scholarship and research directly related to self-care among helping professionals.
The ultimate goal is to help those who are in the helping profession understand self-care does not and should not have to be sacrificed.
The SCL is the first known entity to be explicitly dedicated to examining self-care among helping professionals. The Global Self-Care Initiative is the largest-scale examination of self-care practices among practitioners. “The empirical work emanating from the SCL has really reframed approaches to self-care and wellness among social workers, specifically, and helping professionals, more generally,” Miller concluded. “The international scope of these works demonstrate the reach and impact of CoSW researchers, students, and staff. I’m excited to see what comes next.”
