A Conceptual Exploration: Preparing Social Work Students For Trauma Exposure

Social workers engage with and provide services to a multitude of populations in various settings. Many of these systems and settings were created because of or in response to trauma, oppression, poverty, and/or violence resulting in these issues becoming imbedded or intertwined into the foundation or nature of the settings. This results in social workers being exposed to trauma via the people they work with and/or the environment. Master of Social Work (MSW) programs prepare social workers to provide trauma-informed care, but do not prepare them for the trauma that they will be exposed to or potentially experience directly. Over time this can result in the development of compassion fatigue, moral injury or burnout. This writer offers both a framework for examining and understanding the impact of this issue, as well as a proposed training approach for MSW students. The objective of the training approach is to better prepare MSW students for trauma exposure in the workplace with a goal of social workers having a better understanding of how they are likely to be impacted by their work and how to counter the negative impact.