The Effects of Online Mindfulness and Neurofeedback on Stress, Burnout, and Professional Quality of Life for Social Workers

Background and purpose: As social workers support individuals, families, groups, and communities to overcome hardship, they are among the professions which register high levels of stress and burnout, which in turn reflects negatively both at profession’s level through high turnout rate or difficulty in employing despite high numbers of graduates and at personal level, in the lives of the social workers with low satisfaction with work. In the context of the Coronavirus pandemic and the effects of war, Romanian social workers were invited to participate in our study aiming to identify ways for reducing stress and burnout. Social workers filled in our survey and most of the respondents expressed their interest to take part in the study. Through random sampling the respondents were divided in groups for intervention and one control group.

This poster aims to present the effects of the most complex intervention on perceived stress, burnout, and professional quality of life, by comparing the intervention group with the control group.

Methods: In 2023, 24 social workers participated in an intervention aiming to reduce stress and burnout consisting of two activities: online mindfulness group sessions (eight meetings between June and July 2023) and individual neurofeedback sessions (each participant took part in 20 sessions between April and October 2023). We present the results of a survey which collected data on perceived stress, burnout, compassion satisfaction and compassion fatigue twice: once before the intervention started (November 2022 and January 2023) and one after the intervention was finalized. We compare the results of this group with the control group (15 social workers who filled in the survey each time and who participated in no intervention within the project).

Results: Using SPSS 28.0, we run Paired-Samples T Test for each group to identify the significant differences. We found significant (p<0,05) differences before and after the intervention for perceived stress, personal burnout, work-related burnout, compassion satisfaction and compassion fatigue, as after the combined intervention of mindfulness online and neurofeedback, the respondents reported lower levels of perceived stress, personal burnout, work-related burnout, and compassion fatigue and increased levels of compassion satisfaction.

For only the two groups mentioned before, an Independent-Samples T Test and the results show significant differences between the social workers who participated in the intervention and those in the control group for perceived stress (t(37)=-2,465, p=0,018), personal burnout (t(37)=-3,052, p=0,004), and work-related burnout (t(37)=-2,146, p=0,038).

Conclusions and Implications: Our results indicate that the online mindfulness and neurofeedback intervention had an impact on stress and burnout reduction. The findings are relevant for employers, professional associations and social workers with management responsibilities as focusing on improving the wellbeing of social services specialists could lead to improved practice and job satisfaction, especially in the current social, political, and economic context.