Objective 3: Identify personal feelings that may impact service delivery and worker objectivity. Policy elements sometimes interact in unforeseen ways, impacting the delivery of services as well as the professional’s relationships with clients. Factors such as maintaining objectivity and mental stamina in often emotion-charged client situations are key concerns for the human services professional. Writing in a journal allows you reflect on how policy enactment and client interaction may lead to both positive and negative viewpoints, feelings, and emotions. Journaling also allows you to explore ways you can care for your own well-being as a way to better serve your clients in a professional capacity.

• Read the article “The search for objectivity in measuring social work outcomes” located at: http://www.communitycare.co.uk/2011/12/02/the-search-for-objectivity-in-measuring-social-work-outcomes/
• Write a 1 page (double spaced) journal response to the following points:
  • What are ways that past experiences with clients may affect your objectivity when taking on new clients and providing services?
  • How will you as a provider ensure that past negative interactions with policy or clients does not impact your future viewpoints or promote stereotypes that lead to unethical service delivery?
  • One issue in the helping professions is worker burnout. Because you are so invested in your clients’ lives, their successes may become your successes, their failures, your failures. It is important to have a compassionate heart as a professional, but it is also important that the emotional investment does not take a toll on our own physical and mental well-being, as this will ultimately impact our professional role in advocating and providing benefits for our clients. Identify at least two strategies that you will use to prevent worker burnout.

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