Tackling Victim Advocate Burnout

Teresa Huizar: Hi, I’m Teresa Huizar, your host of One in Ten. In today’s episode, Tackling Victim Advocate Burnout, I speak with Dr. Maddison North, assistant professor at Middle Tennessee State University.  All of us know that victim advocates are the unsung heroes of children’s advocacy centers and any other victim serving agency.

These professionals walk the path with victims and their families starting in a moment of deep crises and staying alongside and providing support until survivors and their families feel ready to move forward without their encouragement and guidance.  But this helping role can take a toll, the chronic exposure to secondary trauma to too few resources and so many victims needing help. This can create a ripe environment for burnout and turnover. How do we mitigate the effects of all they must see and hear every day?  How do we create an organizational structure of support and how do we prevent burnout before it turns into, “I quit.”  I know you’ll be as interested in this important conversation as I was.

Please take a listen.

 

Hi Maddison. Welcome to One in Ten.

 

Maddison North: Thank you, Teresa. I’m very happy to be here.

 

TH: So tell me a little bit about how you got interested in researching the work of victim advocates, and especially the particular study we’re talking about today, which has to do with turnover and burnout among them.

 

MN: Absolutely. So to talk a little bit about my background, my training is in industrial and organizational psychology. That sounds very scary or technical, but that’s really just psychology of the workplace. So we kind of have two spheres. We want to make organizations effective, help them be productive and get the work they want done, but then also looking at employees and thinking about their wellbeing.

During my time as a graduate student, I was a research assistant with Dr. Jane Silovsky at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, and she’s in the Center for Child Abuse and Neglect. And they were doing work looking at developing a training to help victim advocates understand more about evidence-based practices, family engagement and trauma, and this was a training called the E3 or the Enhancement of Early Engagement.

It’s now called the AIMwell Training for those that are curious. I joined that work and was able to add in some things that I thought was relevant from my background and wanting to look at victim advocates in terms of, what keeps them engaged at work, what might make them not want to turn away from this work?

And so that’s how I got connected in with that. And so thinking about the employees that do this important work in helping children.

 

TH: And you know, full disclosure to our listeners, AIMwell is a program of NCA and we were delighted to have researchers interested in both helping us improve it and also really look at its effectiveness and what the work of victim advocates really consist of these days and how we can help them.

So we’re gonna be talking about turnover and burnout a lot. Burnout is a word that you hear used, I mean academically, yes, but also colloquially. And so for the purposes of this study, can you just define burnout? ’cause I hear it used all kinds of ways. Everything from the equivalent of, I feel stressed to oh my gosh, I’ve gotta leave right now. So if you could define it for us, that would be great.

 

MN: Yeah, absolutely. So when I’m talking about burnout, I’m talking about the experience of low motivation and then a depletion of either physical, mental, or emotional energy. So that’s what we think of when we are talking about burnout.

So this emotional exhaustion, low motivation, and sometimes even a withdrawal from wanting to be at work.

 

TH: I’m thinking about reading in this study. First of all, I think that emotional exhaustion is just such a good term for what people often do feel, but I think that it’s interesting ’cause it also, as you’re saying, people do sometimes withdraw and it shows up and it’s a sort of disengagement from what’s going on.

And there’s a body of literature that already exists, not about victim advocates, but just in general around burnout and about its tie to either actual turnover or intention to turnover. Just this idea that you might, or you’re considering it or those kinds of things, can you just sort of lay out before we delve into the study at length, just what does that literature look like overall?

What does it say that connection is?

 

MN: Yeah, so a lot of this work broadly in terms of the literature looks at something called the Job Demands Resource Model. And basically what that’s saying is at our work we have demands. Things like work responsibilities, things that we need to do and resources, so things that help us accomplish that work.

And when those things are in balance, that’s great. We have the ability to do our work and feel that we have the energy to do those tasks. But when there’s an imbalance, when either the demands are really high or the resources are very lacking. We rarely see it the other way, where there’s a lot of resource, no demand.

But when that’s out of balance, that’s typically when those feelings of burnout come, because we do not have the bandwidth to take care of those tasks, even though they have to get done. And so usually when we see that imbalance at work, that’s when those feelings of stress being emotionally overwhelmed or exhausted, start to come.

And so we see that kind of broadly with that model in terms of when burnout will come about and unless there’s some sort of alignment that will push people to think about maybe I should leave and look elsewhere unless there are other circumstances that kind of prevent people from leaving their work.

And sometimes the broader work environment is not supportive of being able to leave your position. And really that can then lead to long-term health issues, being really disengaged and unhappy at work, which is not great for wellbeing.

 

TH: So we’ll talk a little bit more and delve into what it means for victim advocates in a minute, but just in general, in summary, it’s in general in the literature, it’s that burnout is a driver unless something else happens, right?

To mediate that it’s a driver to turnover, which is, I think, how most people think about it. It’s not a surprise because people have had often this experience for themselves, right? Where they were in a position and they began to feel that emotional exhaustion. Nothing changed. Workload didn’t decrease.

There was no more support, and that really pushed them out of the workplace. So how common is it in helping professions, because I think we think about this, of course, burnout can happen in any position, but we also know that in helping professions there’s some additional factors at play.

MN: Absolutely. So just some numbers.

We’ve seen voluntary turnover rates between 25-60% within mental health fields broadly, we’ve seen it up to 40% for child welfare, and part of what contributes to those numbers is, there’s been reports of overwhelming responsibilities, lack of supervision, staff shortages, secondary traumatic stress is a big component of that.

Some of this work adds to emotional strain just because of the content of what the work is being done, and there’s also an expectation sometimes to prioritize client and external partner needs so that can get in the way of the employee’s wellbeing and self care. So that kind of can contribute to helping professionals being particularly at risk of experiencing burnout because there are just so many demands on them.

 

TH: I’m sure there are listeners right now that are going, amen. Preach it. I mean, they’re like been there. I have the t-shirt. One of the things that we often talk about and also is a part of your study and what it looked at, but the role that organizational support or the lack thereof plays into this and also the role of supervisory support. I mean, I think that all of us have heard the saying that you work for your supervisor, not the organization in a lot of ways. If someone has a great supervisor, often this has some mediating effect. Can you talk a little bit about how you set up the study and what you were looking at, and especially as it related to those two factors?

 

MN: So. When we see these problems and we’re like, okay, the demands are too high, what resources could we potentially use to alleviate these things? Now, it would be really easy and really nice if we could compensate better, if we could hire more people to handle the staff shortages, but some of these just are not feasible.

So let’s look at some other potential solutions. And if pay or something more tangible like that is not a possibility. Let’s look internally, what’s there? What can we help build up? What can we support? And so that’s where the idea of, hey, let’s look at our supervisors. Let’s look at the organization. What can be done to bolster the work they do to support those around them?

So we looked at perceived organizational support. So as the term would suggest, how do you perceive the organization cares about you or your wellbeing? And then perceived supervisory support. Similarly, how do you perceive that your supervisor cares about you, your work, and your wellbeing? And we see that individuals who feel like their organization supports them or their supervisor supports them, that they have more job satisfaction, lower emotional exhaustion, and these things can come from different places.

So what I mean by that is, organizational support that’s can be perceived by what are the rewards, the policies and procedures, the working conditions, and then perceived supervisory support comes from feedback, being able to have access to your supervisor. Do they advocate for you at a broader organization level?

So those are some kind of things that contribute to those feelings.

 

TH: You know, one of the things I think that is interesting is that when you look at sort of labor research more generally. These are two things that pop up so that it’s not really completely specific to victim advocates or any other role within a children’s advocacy center.

These are things that if you were to ask almost any employee what’s important, it’s like, well, your workplace culture and workplace support, those kinds of things. And also the fact that you have a supervisor who isn’t horrible and toxic and they’re supportive of you. Right. And so I think that, you know, in some ways it kind of aligns, the starting place kind of aligns from our own  lived experience in a lot of ways as employees, right? Whether you work at a CAC or any place else. To me, what was very interest, well, there were lots of things interesting about this today, but there were a few, which is that as you started digging into this a little bit, I think you were able to flush out some fairly specific things that either contribute or detract from that experience for victim advocates that I wanna unpack here in a minute.

But the other thing I appreciate about this study more generally is that oftentimes when we talk about positions that are helping positions and that come with just naturally a lot of stress, a lot of exposure to secondary traumatic stress, that sort of thing.  One of my pet peeves, I’ll just be honest, has been that often you get into discussions where employees are just sort of like advice, like, oh, go do some great self-care.

Here’s your gift certificate to the nail salon and your gym membership. And the truth is that many of the things that we’re talking about are not gonna be cured by a gym membership. I mean, it’s great to go work out or walk or have your nails done or whatever else you wanna talk about, but that’s not gonna cure the kind of problems that we’re talking about.

And so I just appreciated that you were approaching this from a very organizational perspective because I think that’s critical. One of the things though, that also struck me about this, and then I promise to really dig into your findings here, but that just prompted me to think about it, is when we think about our own national standards for accreditation for CACs, we have certain requirements for supervisory support, essentially for other disciplines that exist.

So, you know, for example, mental health, there’s a requirement about having clinical supervision, for example.  Because the literature has been so skimpy, quite frankly, around victim advocacy, there’s no corresponding requirement really around that for victim advocates. And it’s an interesting thing, and your paper made me think about whether or not we’re doing victim advocates a little disservice here in terms of not paying a little more attention to supervisory support, given the fact that just because literature exists on that specific, to those other roles we have. So hopefully this study will prove itself to be a little bit of a foundation for a closer look and a closer examination of what we need to be doing for victim advocates. But I just also want to dive in here about some themes you found about, first of all, retention, what positively contributed toward it, right?

So in your paper, you call them retention themes. And also those that had to do with burnout. So let’s talk a little bit about retention, because I always love it when studies dive into like positive variants. Like, you know, instead of just all the negative things like. Yeah, what makes someone want to stay?

And so can you talk a little bit about what you found for victim advocates specifically among your themes? ’cause I love the fact that you just listed them right out individually instead of lumping them all into Great. It’s so wonderful that when they feel supported, they stay.

 

MN: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So this was actually part of my favorite thing that I found in doing this work was the retention themes that came through. So something that we had the victim advocates do is report, Hey, have you felt the need to leave your work or not? And if they said yes, we asked them. Okay. What has contributed to that desire to leave?

What has made you stay? And then again, if they said, no, I don’t wanna leave. Okay, what’s keeping you where you are?  And so from that, we looked through all of those responses and tried to find patterns in terms of what people were saying. And so these retention themes, some of them were expected, I think, but a couple of them surprised us.

And so these themes just broadly real quick, were work partners and we can dive into these a little bit more. Broadly work partners, purpose, action, work experiences, job benefits, and then no choice, which no choice might not be no choice.

 

TH: Yeah, I hope not many people said that.

 

MN: No, that was, I mean, that’s why it’s last on the list.

It’s, it’s the smallest theme of the group. But yeah, work partners, I think that’s one that we expected. Those around you are going to be able to help support you or your coworkers or your MDT partners. They can be a resource, whether that’s just somebody to go vent to or somebody to help you get a task done.

This could also be your supervisors that are supporting you. So we saw people specifically talk about the team that they work with, their coworkers, how they share ideas, and even if they don’t agree, sometimes we work together for the greater good. Having leadership that cares about their staff, that there’s no doubt that, hey, if I need access, I can go to them, and they’re committed to helping me get those things done.

So that was the first theme of work partners. So that kind of aligns with our quantitative results anyway, of seeing hey, although this included more than just supervisors, that support is really important for victim advocates.

 

TH: You know, I really appreciated seeing some of their comments, not only about their colleagues in the same organization within the CAC, but about their MDT partners, because I think that not just for victim advocates, but many multidisciplinary team members, past and present will tell you that experience of being in a tight-knit team just really feels very supportive. If it’s healthy, you know, if it’s not, not so much, but if it is, I think people really experience that as something that they miss when they don’t have it and just really fine to be quite different maybe than even other work environments they’ve had.

 

MN: Absolutely. It is definitely a unique team that we see to get this task done and when it works. That’s fantastic. It’s for the betterment of children and so that’s great.

 

TH: The sense of purpose, while it didn’t surprise me, because I think so many people are motivated to come to this work because it gives them a sense of purpose or because they feel it’s a calling or those kinds of things.

It just did remind me what a mediating factor it is in terms of you can have a lot of work, but if you feel that work is working to a purpose. It doesn’t feel the same. It’s an interesting thing about it, the way it shifts your thinking, even though your workload may not have shifted, what has shifted is you don’t feel emotionally exhausted I think in the same way as I think what maybe it’s a protective factor essentially for.

 

MN: Absolutely. And I think what’s interesting is we do have this just colloquial thing of if you enjoy your work, you’re never actually working. But to me this was a special level to that because it’s. You know, going into it that it’s gonna be hard work.

So I think this in terms of just broadly like work ideas in terms of why people like their work, having that desire to help others and get purpose out of that really was a unique finding in terms of the suggestions that kind of came from that. Because I think in other work environments, if we say, focus on you’re doing what you love, that might not work as well or be as impactful as with those that are in helping professionals and having them really think about the impacts that they have on others.

And so seeing victim advocates talk about being with families in crisis, that’s where they wanna be. This is my calling. Seeing even small changes and positive outcomes really invigorates them. And so this one really popped out to me as something unique for helping professionals, but I can see absolutely when you’re entrenched in it, it makes sense because these people are signing up to do difficult work, but it’s their calling.

 

TH: I think it’s interesting what you’re noting the relationship between the sort of sense of purpose and the way it’s connected to, but different from what you called work experiences, which is like the nature of the actual work you’re doing. Like certainly it helps if you like the work you’re doing every day.

Like if you like filling out the forms you do or doing the assessments you do or interacting with the families you do.  But the sense of purpose of something beyond that is, in fact, you might not like everything that you do in terms of the actual work experience. But on the other hand, if you feel like you’re contributing to their wellbeing, if you feel that what you’re doing is making a difference, then that gives you the sense of purpose that as it turns out, maybe more important even than whether you like what you’re doing at any given moment.

 

MN: Absolutely, and I think that’s why we have that work experiences and purpose themes, as you pointed out, is it seems slightly different. You know, anybody could say, yeah, I like coming into work. The culture is nice, the staff is good, but this is something a little bit more of, I’m helping people who are in crisis, and I get my purpose from that. Of course, there’s a fine line there because sometimes that can go too far. If that passion, it overtakes you taking care of yourself or seeking resources if that’s your number one goal, that could be a little bit dangerous, but I think it is important to recognize in this population.

 

TH: It was interesting to me that the rest of these, in some ways, were what you would expect to see? Kind of with any job retention, it’s like action, which meant things like addressing workload or other needed things that the organization essentially could do to address things that might otherwise be problematic to you.

Job benefits, and not just like healthcare benefits, but other benefits of having the job using the word benefit more broadly and then no choice. So I felt like in looking at these things that contributed to retention, that the first three were more specific really to the role of helping professions.

And the last three reminded me that these things were also important to victim advocates or any other helping professional, but in the way that they’re important to anyone, right? Who’s an employee.

 

MN: Right. Regardless of where you may be, you probably wanna have opportunities for growth or you might want a flexible schedule.

You could find that elsewhere, and then no choice. As I mentioned earlier, if the job market isn’t great or there’s a pandemic going on, that might impede you from looking for other options. Yeah, that that would apply to, to everywhere.

 

TH: And that was a whole other interesting thing related to your study was just the timing of it, that certain aspects of it.

It really was so interesting that you were able to see the impact of the pandemic in some ways on your study because you started the study pre pandemic. But in the middle of it, you know, the work for victim advocates really radically changed, and so you could see the impact of that based on that.

I’m now wanting to turn to the sadder side of this, which are the burnout themes, but I did really appreciate the degree to which you tease those out because sometimes I think there’s this mistaken idea, that burnout’s a mystery and how to solve it is a mystery too, and gosh it’s gonna be hard for people to claim that if they read your paper.

So can you talk about the burnout themes as well?

 

MN: Absolutely. So broadly, I’ll list them again. So we have work responsibilities, emotional strain, organizational structure, atmosphere and management system issues, COVID and personal issues. And so yes, COVID definitely popped through as something to contribute to burnout, I’m sure, in this study.

But in terms of some of the other things, work responsibilities. You may expect that high workload, not having enough staff, feeling that you’re having to do administrative tasks that get in the way of wanting to do more of the tasks that you value more in terms of helping families and helping children.

So people talked about I’m drowning in meetings and paperwork and extra duties that aren’t necessary to the main tasks of my job. Feeling overworked. There’s no relief. We’re understaffed, and there’s just so much to do. There’s not enough time to get it done.

 

TH: One of the things that I thought about this again, in the way it separates out, you know, there are some of these that as an employer you would have less ability to affect, right?

We all as employers have had employees who might be going through a difficult time personally. And while we could try to offer some flexibility or additional support, ultimately there’s nothing we can do about whatever that issue is. COVID the same. Sadly, all of us, were unable to do anything about COVID except our very best to cope in a very difficult situation and learn a lot from it.

And systemic issues, which again, I wish I could remake the criminal justice system, but probably none of us are gonna be able to do that. But the first three, I think that’s the thing for employers, I think to hone in on in a very practical way, because things about rates of staffing or where their focus and attention are, how other people either do or don’t pitch in the workplace culture itself.

All of those things are things employers can impact and even I think the emotional strain of the work can be impacted by employer policies. I think before we knew as much about secondary traumatic stress, there was a lot of,  I’m thinking about Francois to her term, that she uses sliming people.

In other words, everybody exposes everybody else to all the secondary traumatic stress they’ve all been exposed to all day long. And the way that, that would have this, just like the emotional weight of not only dealing with all the things you dealt with all day, but now having to hear all the things that everybody else dealt with all day and the impact of that.

And so I think that there’s this role that even with emotional strain, there’s the ability of employers to set policies and practices and norms. That can help with that, I think. And I’m wondering if you saw any examples or heard any examples in your study of any of these things. It doesn’t have to just be that one where you’re like, you know what?

It’s really good that came up because I think this is something that employers could really pay attention to and think, oh, this is one that I really could impact fairly easily.

 

MN: I’m glad you bring this up because we did a talk about this paper at NCA’s Leadership Conference and that was a really great opportunity to not only disseminate this information, but then also at the end have kind of conversation about what have you all found to be helpful in your CACs, in your organization to help deal with feelings of burnout, whether it’s the structure of the organization or feeling that slime of emotional strain, and we got a whole host of different answers for that. From very detailed structure, strategic planning of what the workplace looks like to things like having a monthly, every month on a Friday we do activities and we do crafts, and we eat together and we don’t talk about work.

Or at the end of every meeting, we save 10 minutes. And in those 10 minutes we talk about successes that we’ve had or we don’t talk about at work at all. And we remove that and talk about other things. So that work is not entrenched on us all day. So just having opportunities to recharge or have some meetings surrounding resiliency and dealing with feeling that strain.

And I have other things that we can talk about too that, that were suggested if we want to, but having a book club.  Something as simple as that. People talked about being a great time to, again, kind of not be thinking about work, come together and remove yourself from the emotional strain you may be feeling and get in a different kind of head space.

 

TH: One of the things I was thinking as you were talking was about how many of the examples you’re giving are really about building community, right? It’s about disconnecting from the work, but feeling a sense of community or connection in your own organization, and I think that’s, I just, you know, even within our organization, and we are not the ones who are directly working with children, but that has been very powerful. We even have a Connections Committee because we’ve seen that as so powerful internally. And so I just echo your sentiments about that and I was having a flashback to a moment of one of the CACs that I was director of when I first came there.

We had a medical program on site. Now medical people don’t get mad at me. But you know, this is true about yourselves. They are just kind of like inured to certain medical things because they see it all the time. Those kinds of things. And so they’re not horrified by it or traumatized necessarily in the same way to see, I mean, yes, cumulatively.

I’m not saying they don’t experience secondary traumatic stress, but I’m saying their threshold related to medical things is different than for lay people and these medical professionals would bring into our lunchroom. They would bring in their reports and other things and start talking about them in front of other people and have slides and other things.

And I sat through that a time or two and I was like this. No. I was like, I personally cannot take it. I can’t imagine anybody else either. So I just had a talk with him. I’m like, Nope. No, you need to keep that elsewhere. Lunch is a time where we’re not doing that and I dunno if it made a difference for anybody else, but it certainly made a difference for me.

’cause I needed a space from that. So I’m using this as an example, not to criticize medical folks, but to say, sometimes we just do things without thinking. They didn’t think twice about it. They didn’t even think that they were overexposing people to things. They just were carrying on whatever conversation they’ve been carrying on.

So sometimes it’s for the organization to set the pause, right? Not just to rely on employees to do that naturally themselves, but to notice and say,  wait a minute, we’re just gonna make lunch about not work.

 

MN: Absolutely, absolutely. Some of these changes, even small ones, the 10 minutes at the end of every meeting, that could feel like a big ask and it’s easy to just keep going if, ’cause there’s work that needs to get done.

So if your organization or your supervisor’s like, no, this is a hard stop then and everyone can follow that and stick with that. That will stay and can have a big impact. So it can feel like a big ask, but it is just a small thing and it can have big impacts on people. And some of these are larger changes.

So, you know, one Friday a month we’re not doing work. That that can be a big ask or there’s one CAC that’s changed their model to be four days a week. That’s a huge ask, but if the organization and supervisors can see the benefits of that and really push for that, it can make a big difference.

TH: What I appreciated about all the examples that you provided is that they’re very varied, and so it’s not to say that any particular one is gonna work for any particular CAC.

It’s to say that CACs can talk together. Right. Leadership and staff about how people are really doing, how they’re really feeling, and what would really feel supportive to their workforce and do those things because employees will surprise you. I feel like in terms of what they find particularly meaningful or what feels like relief to them.

It’s not the same universally to people, but, even engaging in that conversation, I think is an employee supportive thing in and of itself.

 

MN: And some people we’ve talked to speak to how either they have one-on-one time with their supervisors to talk about what helps me feel supported, what helps me in terms of feedback and learning.

And then some people have used anonymous surveys. To survey everybody and say, okay, what’s working well? What’s not working well? So that’s kind of a safe space. And then just as you mentioned, people are different. We have people who are more introverted, more extroverted, who might appreciate activities that are more like a book club versus, oh, let’s go do yoga or you know, we’ll build crafts together or something like that. So definitely talking with your staff and seeing what are their needs, whether you have that one-on-one in-depth conversation or the more survey approach. If you’re trying to get a lot of information from everybody and having a safe, anonymous space that can really help inform what would be beneficial for your staff.

 

TH: You know, at the end of the paper you included the set of strategies that I thought was really helpful. Again, because it wasn’t that any particular example you have to lock onto. But again, sort of broadly, you had a list of things supporting employees. We’ve been talking about some of those things, creating safe work environments.

I was just noting how many times you used the word safe, even in the thing you just said. It is true. It’s important for people to feel psychologically safe enough that they can say, I’m overwhelmed. I’m exhausted. I need a change. I need a break. I need to go on vacation, or whatever they need to say about those things.

You also noted addressing secondary traumatic stress, and I think that this. To be honest, field wide is a little bit of a weakness of ours. It’s something that we’ve added into our own standards, and I think CACs are doing more and more on it. More and more training and sample policies and other kinds of resources have been coming out of regionals and chapters, which has been wonderful.

But even so, I think there’s still a little bit of a tendency to instinctively or reflexively reach for some of these other solutions.  It just feels to me like if one of the core issues is exposure is secondary traumatic stress, you can probably do all these other things and if you don’t address secondary traumatic stress.

It might not be as effective as you’re hoping. Right, right.

 

MN: Absolutely. Yeah. And with this, we’ve in communications with people we’ve seen, there’s programs out there, so one that I mentioned in the paper is CE-CERT, which is the Components for Enhancing Career Experience and Reducing Trauma. And so that helps to deal with the impact of secondary traumatic stress by talking about, okay, what’s the mission?

What’s our mission? What’s our passion? And then what are the practices and activities and little interventions that we can do to help support those things? So how do we process our emotions? What’s our physiological response to stress? How can we healthily handle that? How can we put healthy boundaries with our work?

And then some organizations have done things such as they have a burnout specialist that once a month comes and either does sessions on burnout, talks through what’s going on this month with what’s a lesson or a support that I can provide. This is a book club thing, but there’s been book clubs about burnout.

So there’s books–

 

TH: A twofer.

 

MN: Right, so we’re covering a couple things there, and then we can, in those surveys, be very intentional about assessing feelings of burnout so that we can kind of keep track of where things are at. If we’re not measuring these things, then how do we know if we’re impacting them or helping?

 

TH: One of the things that you also mentioned on the list was about making the sort of mission and purpose more salient to people and what that made me think about is how I’ve seen this play out with multidisciplinary team members who often struggle with the exact same things, but unfortunately they’re even at more of a disadvantage often than CAC staff.

CAC staff are lucky in that they don’t just see kids in moments of crisis, but often it’s ongoing services are provided at the CAC. They see kids come back for therapy, they see them get better, those kinds of things, which I think can really be. Helpful. You know that you’re not just seeing people only in crisis.

You can see the full cycle of that. And one of those things that we’ve said to people about that is that helping your multidisciplinary team partners also see kids get better by bringing those stories into case review can be very powerful. And one of the things I was thinking about is, you know, we’ve launched this addition to our outcome measurement system, which is around surveying caregivers about the mental health services that they receive through CACs that their children receive.

And the comments parents put down are just so moving about seeing their own kids better, how, what difference it makes. And what I was thinking about is I wonder whether those ever get shared with the victim advocates who referred those kids to therapy. Do they ever get shared with multidisciplinary team members?

Because if you wanna make a connection to purpose, you referred these kids on to therapy and look, mom is reporting the kids sleeping well, that they’re doing better at school, they’re functioning at home. You know, it’s just, I think that’s the piece of making it salient and there are, I think simple things that people already collect or have in their organization that can help with that.

It’s not like giving pep talks and reading poems, like there’s stuff you can do.

 

MN: Yeah, absolutely. And I think when we venture into an organization, it’s like, okay, get to work. We’ve got things to do. Let’s take a moment. What are we doing and why are we doing it? And continually reflecting back on what we’re doing.

It could be a small thing. What’s our mission? Let’s think about that. Some of these wins are big wins, but even the small wins, let’s celebrate those and let’s talk about those positive outcomes that we’re seeing with families. And I think bringing that back to MDTs or victim advocates who might not be there all the way at the end, but can get some of that information at the response back from mothers or whatnot is a fantastic idea.

 

TH: So I could talk to you a lot longer, but I know you have students and you have classes, and you have other things besides just us. Is there anything else you wanted to make sure we talked about today or anything that I should have asked you and didn’t?

 

MN: I think a potential idea for things that could be supportive is helping establish peer networks, so whether that’s formal or informal support groups that can help with relationship building or shared experiences.

One thing that we didn’t assess in this study is peer support. And so I think that’s something, especially since that came through in our qualitative findings, was the importance of peers and colleagues. That would’ve been something great to also have collected. And so that really popped through. And I do wanna also note in terms of the so what of like, why do we want to stop turnover from happening is in terms of an organization sense?

I guess this, the selling point here for organizations is when we have turnover, it’s detrimental to the services that we provide. It’s costly in terms of training new staff, but turnover can be particularly harmful in helping professions because that caseload might need to get redistributed. We even see a decline in service effectiveness when we lose the people who’ve been trained to do the job and so anything that we can do to help support our victim advocates so that they feel that they have the resources they need to meet the demands that are there and continue the work so that not only is the organization thriving, the employees are thriving, and then the populations they serve also have the opportunity to thrive.

 

TH: Oh my goodness. I agree with you so much on all of that. I think victim advocates are really the unsung heroes of this movement and often the glue for families and teams and everything else. So I think anything that we can do to support them so that we can retain them is something that we wanna do.

Well, thank you so much Maddison, for coming on to One in Ten, and when you publish next, come on back. We’d love to talk to you anytime.

 

MN: I appreciate it.

 

TH: Thanks for listening to One in Ten. For our next episode, it will be a best of the best replay of my interview with Dr. Melanie Nadon, Which Child Abuse Reports Matter?

Then in October, we’ll be back here with new fresh interviews again. For more information about this episode or any of our other ones, please visit our podcast website at oneintenpodcast.org.