Utmattningssyndrom bland socialarbetare: En kvalitativ studie av socialarbetarens hantering av utmattningssyndrom

During the recent years there have been an increase in sick leave due to mental health issues all over Europe. In Sweden it started to rise in the 90’s and have not stopped since then. Today mental health disorders are the most common reason for sick-leave in Sweden. This applies especially among people working within human services, including social workers. Social workers have a high risk for stress in their work environment, often because they have a high workload. Our aim with this study was to examine which strategies social workers used when managing burnout in their workplace, to understand how these strategies worked in practice. In order to examine these different strategies we used a qualitative method with interviews with six social workers from three different municipalities. All of the social workers worked within the social services but in different sections of the social services. Too analyze our results we used the concepts informal and formal structure and Lipsky’s theory of discretion among street level bureaucrats. We used these concepts to see if the strategies that social worker used came from the informal or formal structure. This study found that the social workers could identify multiple strategies from the formal structure but all of the social workers used the informal structure strategies much more when coping with stress and burnout in their workplace. The strategies that the social worker identified from the formal structure was: different staff meetings, guidance from their boss, occupational healthcare and the opportunity of having a talk with their boss. From the informal structure the social worker identified the colleges and their own individual strategies like mindfulness, taking a break, not getting involved in discussions, exercise and different avocations. When analyzed which strategies the social workers used and which they identified as potential strategies it was a common theme that they used the colleges and their individual strategies much more than the formal strategies. Our conclusion is that the workplace does not supply the social workers with adequate strategies to handle stress and burnout and therefore the social worker has to turn to the informal structure or use their discretion to create their own strategies