Resilience and Mindfulness Training for Case Managers During COVID-19

Social workers may be at particular risk for emotional and mental health complications as they subscribe to a specific set of professional characteristics where there exists a strong desire to empower and help others; in particular those who are vulnerable and lack resources and skills to advocate for themselves. It could be argued that social workers experience empathy and awareness for their suffering clients; and a strong desire to provide resources and relief. There is much in the literature to support the great extent care professionals are at risk for compassion fatigue. This project examines efficacy and impact of resilience training on Utah's Case Managers and Department of Aging and Adult services employees, during the COVID-19 pandemic. I use the term case managers interchangeably with social workers, and case workers, as the literature often refers to social workers, but my project deals with those working in their capacity as case managers or case workers. Case managers, and social workers have been deemed non-essential workers per government guidelines during this pandemic. These guidelines limit face-to-face contact with clients, mandate the wearing of mandatory masks in public, require working from home, and cause shifts in caseloads and schedules. The impact from required mandates has left case managers feeling overwhelmed and up-ended. Ultimately this debacle creates the perfect storm, resulting in higher rates of compassion fatigue and burnout. This project presented two resilience- training videos both created by University of Utah College of Nursing faculty, during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, in order to provide evidence-based tools and techniques to those working with vulnerable populations. Mindfulness and breathing techniques were discusses in the videos along with methods to shift to a healthy perspective and increase well-being in order to bolster resilience. Quantitative Likert-format pre and post surveys were administered and an additional qualitative questionnaire with open-ended questions was included along with the post survey. There was a 16% participation (N=25) rate with results demonstrating a 44% increase in participant's improvement of feelings of well-being post-training. By using In-Vivo style coding- which derives codes from participants actual words and phrases, and frequency style coding, identifying multiples of similar words the qualitative findings confirmed participants felt overwhelmed and oppressed due to the pandemic mandated restrictions.