ABSTRACT
Human services work is recognised as an occupation with high levels of stress. The problematic consequences for individual workers, clients, and organizations are well documented internationally. Social work associations regularly raise concerns over a looming crisis in the profession; these concerns arise as a result of increasing demands for social work services and an ageing gendered (female) demographic of workers, coupled with a lack of new recruits to the profession and apparent lack of public and governmental commitment to investing resources in human service workers and organizations. Efforts to consider resilience at the individual worker level have not resulted in substantial gains in attracting or retaining social workers. This has led to a shift in emphasis, suggesting that resilience could more fruitfully be considered as an organizational or even broader macro-level socio-political construct. Ideally, supported resilient workers are embedded in resilience enhancing organizational cultures operating in a context of public and political respect for, and proper resourcing of, the human services workforce. This chapter provides examples of contemporary contextual stressors, with specific attention to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic and discusses current resilience related research and theorising in the domain of human services.
