Research In Action

Individuals working in professions dedicated to serving others, often termed “helping professionals,” operate in diverse environments, including healthcare, social services, and education. Helping professionals frequently grapple with the pain, suffering, and injustice of those they help. While many experience intrinsic satisfaction from serving others, these challenges also expose helping professionals to heightened risk for burnout and secondary traumatic stress. The Stress-Less Initiative© (SLI), a 12-session team intervention originally developed to support community-based social workers, was designed as a proactive intervention to counteract these known risks by growing protective factors, including social support, positive coping skills, and supportive workplace culture. SLI is internally facilitated by a team member, who is poised to tailor content and implementation to their team’s unique setting and roles.

Intentionally Adapting and Scaling SLI

Our team of practitioners and researchers at the Center for Violence Prevention (CVP) are working to explore how SLI might be translated to settings outside of social services to support other helping professionals working in fields like healthcare, education, and community-based mental health who face similar workplace challenges to the social workers for whom SLI was initially designed. Two studies, recently published in Psychology in the Schools and Traumatology, describe our team’s recent expansions of SLI to staff working in under-resourced schools and to a multidisciplinary hospital team, respectively. In both studies, we interviewed SLI participants with varying levels of attendance at the end of the 12-session series to hear about their experiences with SLI.

In both settings, participants described their own experiences with burnout and secondary trauma and affirmed the need for workplace-led supported interventions, like SLI, in addition to their own self-care:

“Because we're hardly ever, during professional development time…talking about anything that might relate to us internally and how to deal with the stresses that we may encounter in coming to work every day. So actually, I would think that people would see it as an, 'Oh, they do care if we're coming in stressed and want to make sure we have some type of skills to calm down or,' you know. That's why I would think it would work, because it's something different than what we usually do.”

Universally, participants described SLI as professionally and personally meaningful and relevant. Participants took comfort in SLI’s emphasis that secondary traumatic reactions are a natural byproduct of helping work and not individual deficits, and they appreciated their organization’s recognition of this occupational hazard. Even for participants for whom content was more familiar, they described sessions being an important reminder to implement the strategies—like setting boundaries—that they already knew could enhance their wellbeing but did not routinely prioritize. Sessions also equipped teams with shared language around traumatic stress and preventive measures, nurturing a team culture where colleagues encouraged and supported one another.

As reported in our recent publications, school- and healthcare-based participants alike felt they had grown personally and as teams. As individuals, participants noted greater awareness of their stress levels and validated in their experiences of secondary trauma and burnout. They reported more proactively managing stressors, through self-advocacy, boundary setting, and restorative practices like mindfulness and time outdoors. Further, through in-session connection with their teams, they described feeling less isolated, being better able to empathize and communicate with their colleagues, and a more positive, cohesive team culture.

Maintaining Momentum

At present, more than 20 teams have or are currently implementing SLI, representing over 400 participants from school settings, community mental health, hospital violence intervention programs, and pediatric healthcare settings. Here at CHOP, ten unique healthcare teams have implemented SLI across seven departments. These studies have positioned our team to rapidly incorporate lessons learned to enhance SLI’s feasibility, uptake, and sustainability in these diverse settings. As we expand SLI to new teams, we continue to be intentional in our expansion—routinely meeting with team facilitators to troubleshoot implementation challenges, monitoring session fidelity, and identifying needs for further research.

As SLI continues to expand and evolve, our team remains committed to empowering helping professionals across diverse settings with the support they need to thrive. We aspire for this work to pave the way toward a healthier, more resilient future in the helping professions.

Learn more about our team’s recent studies on school staff perspectives on implementing and sustaining culturally relevant well-being initiatives in schools, and implementing a secondary traumatic stress group intervention with a multidisciplinary health care team.

Interested in bringing SLI to your team? Complete our interest form.