Riding the waves of the pandemic from West to East: The social workers' experience an International collaboration on study of social workers during COVID-19.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic had devastating consequences on the physical, mental, social, and economic wellbeing of billions of people around the globe. During the first two years of the Covid-19 pandemic, social workers, like other health-care professionals, worked on the frontline (Ashcroft et al., 2022). The pandemic disproportionally affected more vulnerable populations, i.e., people living in poverty; immigrants; and those living in nursing homes, shelters, detention centers, and prisons – populations which are usually treated by social workers, putting social workers under tremendous stress and overload (Davies & Cheung, 2022). Social workers were expected to address a range of psycho-social needs emerging from the pandemic (Amadasun, 2020) while they themselves were at high risk of being infected with the virus (Tian et al., 2022). Social workers were engaged in a massive scale of grief work (Ashcroft et al., 2022), a greater caseload of domestic violence (Davies & Cheung, 2022), and like other health-care workers, had to cope with an increasing amount of violence from patients and their families (Dopelt et al., 2022). At the same time, they struggled with an additional source of stress – namely, the lockdowns that were posed on their families and the shutdown of their children’s schools which occurred in many countries (Maiya et al., 2021). No wonder social workers, as well as other health-care professionals (Smallwood et al., 2021), were at greater risk for depression, loneliness, insomnia, burnout, and low levels of social support than the general population (Fang et al., 2021; Lai et al., 2020; Pappa et al., 2020; Smallwood et al., 2021; Zhang et al., 2020). While health-care workers’ exposure to the virus, fear of contaminating family members, mental health, and burnout has drawn research attention throughout the COVID-19 pandemic (Feingold et al., 2022; Prasad et al., 2021; Preti et al., 2020), ongoing research is needed. Furthermore, while countries have, in large, moved away from the policy of lockdowns and travel restrictions that occurred during the initial stages of the pandemic, the infection rates continue to rise and fall. As such, the impacts of the pandemic on social workers and other health-care professionals are not over yet and need to be continually documented and analyzed. Along with the negative consequences of the pandemic, however, a growing number of publications have addressed some positive consequences for health-care workers, such as psychological resilience (Heath SOCIAL WORK IN HEALTH CARE 2022, VOL. 61, NO. 4, 185–198 https://doi.org/10.1080/00981389.2022.2108569