“It Makes You a Healthier Professional”: The Impact of Reflective Practice on Emerging Clinicians’ Self-Care

ABSTRACT

Reflective practice helps clinicians manage the complexity and uncertainty inherent in day-to-day practice. This is important given the high rates of burnout, turnover, and trauma-related stress among social workers and other clinicians. Using focus groups with 55 social work and child development graduate students and alumni, this study explored how engaging in a reflective practice framework, including individual reflective supervision and reflective practice seminars, impacted emerging clinicians’ self-care in positive and meaningful ways. Participants reported being better able to care for themselves both personally and professionally; having improved emotional health; having better satisfaction, sustainability, and longevity on the job; and developing a new standard (model) for their future practice. This study has important implications for how higher education institutions prepare social work and other social service professionals, suggesting that the institutionalization of reflective practice during graduate school, may help future practitioners care better for not only their clients, but also themselves.

Notes

¹ Throughout the document, Erikson Institute will be referred to as Erikson.

² In the larger study we also gathered faculty perspectives. Those are beyond the scope of the analysis for this article and will not be presented.

³ All of the MSCD participants were part of the infancy specialization.

⁴ The authors conducted all of the research activities for this project, including all predata collection, data collection, and data analysis, the only exception being a professional transcription company transcribed the focus group data.

⁵ We were unable to differentiate in any meaningful way between student and alumni experiences and so the data are presented together.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Faculty Innovation Fund at Erikson Institute.

Notes on contributors

Ashley Curry

Ashley Curry, PhD, LCSW, is an assistant clinical professor with the Social Work Department at Erikson Institute in Chicago. Pamela Epley, PhD, is an associate clinical professor with the Early Childhood Education Department at Erikson Institute and Director of Special Education.