Improvement of the working conditions of health visitors active in Roma communities

The burnout syndrome cannot be interpreted as a medical diagnosis, but it is rather a social psychological concept. The concept of syndrome (contrary to symptom which is a single endogenous sign) is mostly used in social psychology and its main criterion is that it focuses on the interactions between the individual and his/her environment.

The health visitor activity is one of the most beautiful, most responsible and hardest field of helper occupations, which can only be performed good, if it is performed as a profession, says Mrs. Márta Kahlichné Dr. Simon professor in the review of her book “A védőnői hivatás története” (History of the health visitor profession).   

In the supervision work we process the cases cited by the participants, we reflect to them as professional situations and focus on the feelings and assumptions of the citing person(s) regarding the situation, their thinking patterns, behaviour and professional personality. In addition to the situations regarding the clients (care recipients in case of health visitors), the colleagues, the representatives of the similar professions, the managers, the superiors and the institutional and the local environment, also the relation of the participant to her profession, work or career can be a topic. As I have been dealing as a supervisor with health visitors since August 2013, during the supervisions I realised the recurrent questions regarding the selection of the health visitor career and the assessment of the success and the efficiency of the career.

The aim of this article is to introduce the inter-institutional supervision which is a supervision form facilitating the efficient cooperation within the currently available connection system and which is recently rarely applied in Hungary.

During my supervision work with health visitors and the informative activity of this project, I experienced that the majority of health visitors come to love and consider important the support provided by the supervision, if available for them, in the personal professional learning, the preservation of his/her psychic and mental well-being and regarding the common creative problem solving and the reach of the relevant professional operation in critical situations. At the same time, there is little consciousness and often lack of confidence during the organisation of supervision and other group consultancy processes which expressly support the common work of workplace teams or service providers involved in other forms into the care of a region. I would like to introduce and to attract the attention to the aims and possibilities hidden in this form of work and to point out some deficiencies in the treatment of which the support processes organised in this way may provide lots of help.