Managing Vicarious Trauma and Burnout, 13 August 2027

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN

• Assess Your Professional Quality of Life with ProQOL: Use the Professional Quality of Life Scale (ProQOL) to explore compassion satisfaction, burnout and secondary traumatic stress and reflect on what your results mean for your own wellbeing.

• Recognise Vicarious Trauma, Compassion Fatigue and Burnout: Understand the differences and overlap between these experiences, including common warning signs, risk factors and impacts.

• Understand How Trauma-Exposed Work Affects the Nervous System: Explore mirror neurons, neuroception, co-regulation and the Window of Tolerance, and learn why empathy and repeated exposure to distress can affect helpers physiologically as well as emotionally.

• Strengthen Professional Boundaries and Self-Awareness: Explore transference, countertransference, over-involvement and the rescuer dynamic, and learn how reflective practice and healthy boundaries protect both you and the people you support.

• Strengthen Professional Boundaries and Self-Awareness: Explore transference, countertransference, over-involvement and the rescuer dynamic, and learn how reflective practice and healthy boundaries protect both you and the people you support. Learn to recognise patterns such as rescuing, over-involvement and emotional withdrawal from clients, and develop strategies to maintain effective professional boundaries.

• Build Your Toolkit for Self-Regulation and Self-Care: Practise grounding, breathing, mindfulness, somatic regulation and self-compassion. Explore the SEEDS framework — Social Connection, Exercise, Education, Diet and Sleep — and develop a realistic, personalised self-care plan.

• Understand Psychological Safety and Organisational Responsibility: Explore how supervision, manageable workloads, peer support and psychologically safe workplaces can reduce risk, and understand the role of psychosocial risk management in protecting worker wellbeing.

• Discover Vicarious Resilience and Growth: Explore compassion satisfaction, vicarious resilience and post-traumatic growth, and how witnessing the courage, survival and recovery of others can strengthen your own sense of hope, purpose and meaning.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND

• Counsellors, psychologists and therapists

• Social workers, caseworkers and youth workers

• Healthcare and community service professionals

• Educators and school wellbeing staff

• Settlement and refugee support workers

• Managers and supervisors of trauma-exposed teams

• Administrative and support staff in trauma-exposed services

• Community leaders, volunteers and peer workers

• Anyone regularly exposed to trauma or distress through their work

FORMAT AND INCLUSIONS

• Online and in-person delivery

• Facilitated by an experienced trauma-informed practitioner

• Includes interactive activities, real-life scenarios, and skill practice

• Claim 4 CPD points

• Receive a certificate of completion

• Receive a PDF of the workshop slides

TERMS AND CONDITIONS

Payment of the registration fee is online by credit card and a receipt/confirmation will be automatically emailed to you. An administration fee of $30 applies to all cancellations made more than 14 days the day before the start of the event. Registration once paid cannot be cancelled 14 days or less the day before the start of the event, regardless of personal circumstances. Registration can be transferred to another delegate only if STARTTS is informed of the name change. Registration cannot be transferred to another workshop. The concession price is for full-time students, seniors and the unemployed. A photocopy or pdf of a valid concession card must be forwarded to the STARTTS training team upon registration. Registrations will not be confirmed until full payment is received. The deadlines for the early bird and standard prices cannot be extended. Sometimes STARTTS will need to change the trainer of a particular workshop. The STARTTS Training Team can be contacted at stts-training@health.nsw.gov.au or (02) 9646 6700.