Trauma-informed practice and supervision for volunteer counsellors of online psychological support groups during the impact of COVID-19

ABSTRACT

After the COVID-19 outbreak, Social Workers across Borders (SWAB) was invited to organise crisis intervention training and supervisions for volunteer counselling teams. By reviewing the supervision records this paper found that the steps of ‘Sensitisation, Education, Scanning, Choice of Opting Out, and Recovery Facilitation’ (S-E-S-C-R) are useful to structure Trauma-Informed Supervision. Analysis indicated that volunteer counsellors have gone through three different stages, namely confusion, coordination and adaptation to changing crisis situations.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• trauma
• supervision
• crisis
• intervention

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Johnston H. C. Wong

Prof. Johnston Wong published a series of books and articles on disaster social work. He started his action research related to Disaster since 2006 from the participation in Asian Tsunami. Areas of research interests include Disaster Social Work, Social Work in Health Care, Occupational Social Work, Working with Youth, Student Development in Higher Education, Emotional and Adversity Intelligence, Social Innovations and Enterprises and International Social Work.

Charles T. L Leung

Dr. Charles Leung is devoting to synthesise the theory and practice of social work for effectiveness. He holds professional qualifications of Registered Social Work (RSW) and Certified Social Work Supervisor (CSWS) in HK. He is also an internationally accredited mediator, as well as a certified project management professional (social development).