Employee well-being in cross-sectoral child-protection: Operationalising the importance of cross-sectoral and multidisciplinary collaboration for employee well-being

Background: The Danish Children Centers (DCC) are a multidisciplinary organisation that specialises in the immediate assessment of child survivors of abuse and coordinates the interagency efforts in cases of child abuse.... [ view full abstract ]

Background: The Danish Children Centers (DCC) are a multidisciplinary organisation that specialises in the immediate assessment of child survivors of abuse and coordinates the interagency efforts in cases of child abuse. First-responders working with children are a particularly high-risk group for developing burn-out and secondary traumatisation. At the same time, this population is also highly resilient and report meaningfulness derived from their profession. Understanding is lacking in terms of the interplay between positive and negative outcomes of working with survivors of child-abuse and what factors influence the development of these outcomes. Furthermore, research on these outcomes is typically conducted from a variable-centered approach within mono-disciplinary populations that have a longer-lasting relationship to the children, challenging the translation of the findings into the context of DCC.
Objective: To promote well-being among professionals working with survivors of child-abuse by identifying staff-profiles predicting the development of burn-out, secondary traumatisation in a multidisciplinary, interagency context.
Hypotheses: Organisational, individual and trauma-related factors interact to produce qualitatively different staff-profiles that will predict positive and negative psychological outcomes over and above quantitatively different scores on predictor-variables. Furthermore, we expect that factors related specifically to the cross-sectoral collaboration will contribute uniquely to psychological outcomes. 
Methods: Latent variable and multilevel modelling will be used to address the hypotheses. Findings will be corroborated through semi-structured interviews.
Expected outcomes: A psychological model of the interplay between risk- and protective factors that will inform recommendations for reducing burn-out and compassion-fatigue and safeguarding well-being of staff working in and with the DCC.