COVID 19 pandemic: Impact of changes experienced on social workers’ professional quality of life in Singapore

ABSTRACT

COVID-19 has impacted all spheres of life massively. Among the emerging studies on the psychosocial impact of the pandemic, few studies look specifically at how social workers are impacted. To understand this gap, this study surveyed 337 social workers. The findings showed that changes experienced in the workplace were enormous and caused secondary traumatic stress while engendering compassion satisfaction among social workers, but the presence of social support moderated to keep the secondary traumatic stress at bay. Resilience mediated association between social and workplace support and compassion fatigue. Social support seemed to have the largest effect on reducing stress through resilience. Workplace support also helped mitigate burnout. In conclusion, continued social and workplace support will be key to supporting social workers during a pandemic.

KEYWORDS:

• Changes experienced
• professional quality of life
• proximity to COVID-19
• resilience
• Singapore
• social support
• social workers
• workplace support

Disclosure statement

No potential competing interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. SARS or severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak from 2002 to 2004 infected more than 8,000 in 29 countries mostly in Asia with nearly 800 fatalities (Pasley, 2020).

2. H1N1, a novel influenza A virus pandemic from 2009 to 2010 was responsible for 18,000 deaths globally (Ang, 2020).

3. DORSCON stands for Disease Outbreak Response System Condition, a color-coded framework that reflects the severity of the outbreak. The colors include green, yellow, orange and red in ascending order of severity (R.J. Lin et al., 2020).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.