Interprofessional Collaboration, Community Resources, and Child Welfare Workforceã¢â‚¬â„¢s Professional Well-Being

Background and Purpose: Child welfare professionals often engage with children and families that present with complex needs. To best support their clients, they may collaborate with professionals in other settings (e.g., court system, mental health and/or substance use treatment facilities), as well as other community resources. These interprofessional collaborations and use of community resources positively impacts their ability to support their clients; thus impacting their professional well-being such as self-efficacy and job satisfaction. Existing studies on the professional well-being of the child welfare workforce primarily focus on individual and organizational factors, with little attention given to interprofessional collaboration and community resources.This study aims to address this knowledge gap.

Methods: Data for this study come from the National Child Welfare Workforce Institute (NCWWI) Comprehensive Organizational Health Assessment 2014-2019. Our sample includes 1,342 respondents who collaborated with court professionals and service providers at least monthly. A multivariate multiple regression was conducted to model two professional well-being outcomes: self-efficacy and job satisfaction. Independent variables include interprofessional collaboration with court professionals and service providers, community resources, organizational climate, annual salary, social work degree, years of working in child welfare, age, gender, and race. The variables used in the analysis were extracted from follow-up data collected between November 2017 and February 2019.

Results: On average, the respondents’ mean rating on the self-efficacy scale is 3.83 (SD=.74), which shows a relatively high level of self-efficacy (1 = Strongly Disagree thru 5 = Strongly Agree). Their mean rating on the job satisfaction scale is 4.17 (SD=.57), which shows a high level of job satisfaction (1 = Strongly Disagree thru 5 = Strongly Agree). The results from the multivariate multiple regression showed a good model fit indices of our path analysis model and showed a good fit in all model fit indices: RMSEA=0.021, CFI=.996, SRMR=0.008. Self-efficacy is positively associated with interprofessional collaborations with other professionals and service providers (β=.13, p<.001), community resources (β=.08, p<.01), organizational climate (β=.28, p<.001), social work degree (β=.05, p<.05), and years of working in child welfare (β=.15, p<.001). Job satisfaction is positively associated with organizational climate (β=.65, p<.001), age (β=.06, p<.01), and annual salary (β=.07, p<.01). Job satisfaction is lower for participants from urban locations (β=-.12, p<.01). Job satisfaction is higher for participants self-idenfied as female (β=.06, p<.01).

Conclusion: Findings from this study highlight the positive impacts of collaboration with other professionals, service providers and community resources on self-efficacy. In addition, having a social work degree and more years working in child welfare also have positive impacts on self-efficacy. Positive organizational climate has positive impacts on both self-efficacy and job satisfaction. In practice, child welfare agencies can establish inter-agency collaboration mechanisms to facilitate interprofessional collaborations and to increase sharing of community resources. Child welfare agencies can collaborate with social work educational programs to recruit workers. It is especially important to foster positive organizational climate.