BJSW Advance Access originally published online on July 31, 2006
British Journal of Social Work 2007 37(7):1247-1261; doi:10.1093/bjsw/bcl081
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The Cost of Caring? Social Workers in Hospitals Confront Ongoing Terrorism
Rachel Dekel PhD is a senior lecturer in the School of Social Work at Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel. Her broad area of interest is coping with traumatic stress. More specifically, she has been studying the immediate reactions, and long term adjustment of both military veterans and civilians who have been exposed to war and terror. She is also involved in studies examining the topic of secondary traumatization among family members of military veterans with PTSD. In the last few years, she has been part of a Trauma Clinic in Meir General Hospital assisting terror victims.
Dr. Shira Hantman is an expert with over 30 years experience in gerontology. Dr. Hantman was a Faculty member and Director of the Continuing Education Programme at the Shapell School of Social Work, at Tel Aviv University. She also chairs several committees in the field, among them those at the Brookdale Institute of Gerontology and at Israel’s National Association of Social Workers. She has published extensively in the field of gerontology, trauma and social work. She is currently the Head of the Department of Social Work at the Tel-Hai Academic College in the Upper Galilee.
Karni Ginzburg PhD is a lecturer in the School Social Work at the Tel-Aviv University. Main research interests: the immediate and long term adjustment to traumatic stress in general, and the mutual relations between stress and somatic illness, in particular; the mediating role of coping strategies; and personal characteristics as stress-buffers.
Zahava Solomon is a Professor of Psychiatric Epidemiology and Social Work at the Tel-Aviv University and the Head of the Adler Research Center for Child Welfare and Protection. Professor Solomon is internationally known for her research on traumatic stress and especially on the psychological sequel of combat stress reactions, war captivity and the Holocaust. She has published six books on psychic trauma-related issues. She has also published over 200 articles and more than 50 chapters. She was member of the DSM-4 Advisory sub committee for PTSD, and has earned numerous Israeli and international awards and research grants.
Correspondence to Rachel Dekel, School of Social Work, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan 52900, Israel. E-mail: dekell{at}mail.biu.ac.il
The study reported here assesses the severity of post-traumatic symptoms and emotional distress among hospital social workers who provided emergency treatment to victims after terrorist attacks in Israel. We examined the contributions of personal and professional exposure to terrorism, professional training, supervision, sense of professional confidence, and optimism to the severity of distress among 144 social workers at eighteen hospitals in various parts of the country. Emotional distress was assessed by two measures: secondary traumatization (post-traumatic symptoms after treating victims of terrorist attacks), and additional psychiatric symptomatology. Only 7 per cent of the workers reported secondary traumatization, and their levels of distress on accompanying psychiatric symptoms were significantly lower than the norms for the general Israeli population. We also found that professional exposure to terrorism, sense of professional confidence and optimism contributed significantly to the explained variance in distress. The discussion deals with the findings in light of the rise in terrorism in recent years and the professional literature on the topic.
Keywords: social workers, secondary traumatization, optimism, terrorism
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