Intervenčný program starostlivosti o seba pre pomáhajúce profesie

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Margita Mesárošová - Miroslava Köverová - Soňa Lovašová

Intervention Program for Supporting Self-Care in Helping Professions: "How Do I Take Care of Myself?" The intervention program "How Do I Take Care of Myself?" was developed as part of the research project APVV14-0921, "Self-Care as a Factor in Coping with the Negative Consequences of Engaging in Helping Professions." Its uniqueness lies in being created based on specific research outputs from the program's authors and project.

In the first chapter, the authors offer insights into the preparation of the intervention program, justifying its theoretical foundations, methods, and specifics of the program participants. They also provide an overview of research on the effectiveness of various intervention programs aimed at reducing the negative consequences of helping and enhancing self-care and other positive effects of engaging in helping professions. Subsequent chapters focus on a detailed analysis and evaluation of the effectiveness of the intervention program "How Do I Take Care of Myself?" and its comparison with the effectiveness of other programs, which were differently focused, targeted at different populations of helping professionals, and had different theoretical and practical orientations and foundations. Most of these studies demonstrated positive changes only in isolated cases, due to various methodological shortcomings often related to practical application.

What differentiates the intervention program presented in this monograph is the participation of helping professionals actively practicing in the social field, unlike most intervention programs compiled and validated for students of these professions. The student population, being more accessible to researchers, allows for better methodology, including a larger number of participants, as well as experimental manipulation and group balancing. In the case of participants in the validation of the program "How Do I Take Care of Myself?", it involved practitioners who are engaged in the daily work process and completed training during their work breaks, which placed high demands on balancing their work and personal tasks. We believe that the effects we discovered during the validation of the effectiveness of the presented intervention program were not always clearly mathematically graspable but were evident from individual feedback.

We present the text of this monograph to the professional public with the aim of highlighting the benefits, limitations of the intervention program, as well as inspiring researchers and practitioners to further work in this area.

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