Compassion Fatigue Case Study

Compassion fatigue is the emotional residue from the exposure of hearing trauma stories over and over until your heart and head is full until the caller/client’s trauma becomes your experience too. You cannot hear story after story and remain unaffected. As your callers/clients experience a daily repetition of trauma, so will you .Being a witness to pain, loss, fear, terror or injustice that the caller/client is living through and has to endure will eventually effect all of us.

Health providers suffer from an emotional problem called compassion fatigue. Often times compassion fatigue occurs do to the situations encountered by health care professionals and the pain they feel for the patients they care for. One of the essential components of health care is providing care is compassion

The concept of this EBP change project is compassion fatigue as it relates to nurses working in an emergency department (ED) dealing with secondary trauma causing symptoms of compassion fatigue (CF). Compassion is defined as the empathetic awareness of another’s distress, united with a desire to alleviate it (Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, n.d.). Fatigue is the physical or mental depletion that can be the result of strain, overwork, or disease (The Free Medical Dictionary,

Compassion fatigue is widely known in the health care profession. Nurses working overtime and long working days to provide care for the patient and the patient’s families are a continuous stress on a nurse’s emotional and physical well-being especially if the nurse is providing the patient with end of life care as this contributes to both physical and mental work. Vital

Potter, P., Deshields, T., Berger, J.A., Clarke, M., Olsen, S., & Chen, L. (2013). Evaluation of a compassion fatigue resiliency program for oncology nurses. Oncology Nursing Forum 40(2), 180-187.

According to Coetzee and Hester (2010) compassion fatigue was adopted as a synonym for secondary traumatic stress disorder. The aim of their 2010 concept analysis of the topic was to further define compassion fatigue as it applies to the nursing practice. They describe the process of compassion fatigue from just simply discomfort to compassion stress and finally fatigue. (p.1) Their analysis describes how damaging compassion fatigue can be on a nurse’s ability to provide compassionate care. The information is vital to the field of nursing and the outcomes of our patients. Specifically, it plays an important role in my personal practice. It’s a nurse responsibility to provide compassion care for the ill. In the process nurses are exposed daily to their patient’s pain trauma, and their struggles. This and other factors such as unsafe work conditions can take a toll on nurses and their functionality.

Occasionally, a major disaster strikes people with whom the viewer in an industrialised country can personally identify without difficulty. Jonathan Benthall (1993) suggests that Western media can at times be preoccupied by the fate of a ‘single, identified person such as a boy who has fallen down a well in Italy, or examples such as hostages, hijack victims, or small children whose lives could be saved by expensive advanced surgery’ [p.196]. Although the literature on what motivates charitable giving is relatively sparse, a series of recent studies in decision psychology have produced some interesting findings that support Benthall’s statement. Small and Lowenstein (2007) conducted a field experiment that demonstrated when asked to contribute

Compassion fatigue is a cumulative process that is affected by interaction with patients and the nurses. Compassion Fatigue was first described by (Joinson, 1992) in a study of burnout in nurses who worked in an emergency department. He recognized that the compassion fatigue include the characters such as chronic fatigue, irritability, dread going to work, aggravation of physical ailments, and a lack of joy in life. (Figley, 2002) later defined compassion fatigue as a state of tension and preoccupation with the individual or cumulative traumas of clients. Compassion fatigue results from paying intensive effort and giving compassion over a prolonged period to those who are suffering, often without experiencing the positive outcomes of seeing patients improve (McHolm, 2006).

Compassion fatigue and burnout are consistently found to be negatively correlated with compassion satisfaction, reinforcing the notion that compassion satisfaction may function protectively (Yoder, 2010). Compassion satisfaction tends to be higher among intensive-care unit nurses than among emergency-department nurses (Yoder, 2010). Compassion fatigue is more prevalent among nurses who work 8-hour shifts than it is among those working 12-hour shifts (Yoder, 2010). All in all, the care-giving component of the nursing profession correlates positively with compassion fatigue (Burtson & Stichler,

Compassion fatigue like any condition comes with its own assortment of signs and symptoms, subsequently making it vital to identify these signs to properly address the condition in the health care personnel suffering it. According to the website “Tend”, co-developed by a clinical psychologist/trauma specialist and a psychotherapist/compassion fatigue specialist, Dr. Partricia Fisher and Francoise Mathieu, the symptoms of compassion fatigue come in three forms, physical behavioral, and psychological. The physical signs of compassion fatigue are exhaustion, feeling tired at the beginning of a shift or “coming back to work after a weekend off and still feeling physically drained.” (Fisher and Mathieu), insomnia, susceptibility to illness, and

The world of today has been a witness to countless menacing wars, violence, and tragedies, but the amount of sympathy and compassion the people feel towards it has significantly decreased. In fact, it is believed by many that capacity of compassion is limited and so the lack of consideration for other’s suffering is part of human nature. Psychologists such as C. Daryl Cameron and Keith Payne have developed the collapse of compassion theory, described in the article, “How to Increase Your Compassion Bandwidth,” that suggests that people are growing to become indifferent and less empathetic towards major moments in history of inhumane behavior. The apathetic attitude individuals have towards tragedies is not a phenomenon only seen in the recent years, but in fact can be traced to about seventy years ago, in the midst of the Holocaust. The Holocaust was carried out by Adolf Hitler and his Nazi reign, between 1933 and 1945, which brought upon the world a massive genocide that almost killed the entire Jewish population of Europe. For nearly twelve years, Jewish people were isolated from society with discriminative laws, thrown into crowded and unsanitary ghettos, and then shipped into concentration camps where they met their deaths. The Jews were endlessly slaughtered in a cruel manner, but yet hardly any people cried out for its injustice. The behavior of the Nazis was condoned by most of the German people who supported its reign and even the prisoners of the death camps began

summary, a fair amount of research has been conducted on burnout and compassion fatigue. it is important to understand the individual factors that lead to the development of burnout and compassion fatigue. Another purpose is to understand whether or not the experience of STS is limited only to those who have direct contact with individuals who are experiencing trauma symptoms. Additionally, most literature that discusses coping with compassion fatigue focuses on self-care techniques rather than on an effective style of cognitive appraisal. Common assumptions are that effective coping styles for healthcare workers will generalize to the mental health field. The present study also aims to identify a coping profile indicating whether or not a

Compassion fatigue and burnout is a burgeoning area of interest primarily due to its adverse effects on a nurses’ health, productivity, and patient care. Despite the literature on nursing burnout and compassion fatigue, the lived experiences of nurses have virtually been ignored. According to Thomas & Wilson (2004), compassion fatigue is the stress, strain, and weariness of caring for others who are suffering from a medical illness or psychological problem” (p. 82). In contrast, burnout is a accumulation of stress due to the repetitive demands of daily life, a state of physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion caused by a depletion of the ability to cope with one’s environment, particularty the work environment (Maslach, 1982). Burnout more often point to environment stressors, whereas definitions of compassion fatigue address the relational nature of the condition.Increasing and unresolved stress leads to compassion fatigue, it is the accumulation of fatigue that leads to a state of exhaustion and

Figley (2002a) defined “Compassion Fatigue” as a sense of helplessness and confusion around an emotional investment in helping those who are suffering. Compassion Fatigue has been linked to 10 variables. Starting variable begins with Empathic Ability, the ability to notice the pain of others. Following with Empathic Concern, noticing the pain of others and wanting to help the other person. Thirdly is Exposure to the client, the more time face to face with a consumer. Consecutively follows Empathic Response – taking the steps and making an effort to help reduce or alleviate the suffering of the consumer through understanding. Afterward becomes Compassion Stress, the stress one feels from the additional empathy towards another. Sixth is

According to Killian (2008), the biggest factors to impact compassion satisfaction positively is an individual’s social support(.46), internal locus of control at work(.22) and negatively is work hours(-.37). Meaning that the more social support people have outside of work would increase their feeling of compassion satisfaction and belief that they have control over the outcome of their experience also positively increases their compassion satisfaction. If a person is feeling powerless in their job with an external locus of control, they will have a higher rate of compassion fatigue. Looking