Compassion Fatigue

Scope of the Problem – It has been reported that 16-39% of registered nurses have experienced compassion fatique, and 8-38% experienced burnout.

Health caregivers are the group of people mostly at risk of developing compassion fatigue. Most of the times, compassion fatigue may be as a result of the situations the care providers encountered and the pain they feel for their patients. One of the vital element of healthcare is providing a compassionate care. Compassion is defined as being aware of other people suffering, and desire to help to them reduce the suffering (Ruysschaert, 2009). Compassion fatigue is seen as a form of burnout that affect the health care provider which manifest itself as physical, emotional, and spiritual exhaustion (Lynch & Lobo, 2012). The four major factors that can lead to compassion fatigue are, giving others too much caring and not enough care to self, unresolved past trauma, inability to control stress at work, and lack of satisfaction in the work (Ruysschaert, 2009). Compassion fatigue occurs when the caregivers are milked of their sense of wellbeing, comfort, their purpose in life, strength and all the good qualities they have. It is important for those that caring for others to also pay attention to their own needs. Taking care of your own needs means that you will be healthy and therefore be more able to care for others. The caregiver needs to be able to recognize and discuss compassion in order to avoid it.

While working in an emergency department (ED), nurses are expected to show compassion even when they are exhausted? Over tired? Over worked? Fatigued? The purpose of this evidence-based practice (EBP) project was to educate ED nurses on compassion fatigue (CF) risk factors, causes, and symptoms as well as assist them in its identification among each other and within themselves. Further, the project sought to provide nurses with skills in order to prevent CF. A two-hour workshop consisting of a PowerPoint presentation was implemented in a busy emergency department on the coast of NJ. Teaching nurses about compassion fatigue and ways in which to alleviate and prevent it were stressed. Self-regulation and self-care practices were introduced using interactive activities. Over the next four weeks, emails were sent reiterating self-care and self-regulatory techniques. A Pretest-posttest design used the Professional Quality of Life (ProQOL) measure to determine if burnout and secondary traumatic stress (both components of CF) and compassion satisfaction improved from the workshop. A comparative means analysis showed a decline in CF.

Two hours until shift change and Sally Smith, RN was looking forward to going home and putting her aching legs up on the ottoman and drinking an ice cold Coke. She was thinking to herself that the patients were so needy all the time, she felt she gave them all she had and still all she had was not enough. All Sally heard was “get me this” and “get me that”…

A person’s current life’s circumstances, history, coping style and personality type all determine how compassion fatigue will impact them. If a person is encountering any other stress outside work, then that person is highly likely to experience compassion fatigue, on the other hand a person who is not experiencing any outside stressors may not arrive at that final stage in the process of CF. Study have shown that a person’s history affects the way in which he/she is affected by traumatic events. Psychologies implemented a theory in which variables, measure exposure to stressful events; the survey inquired about a number of negative life events (e.g., getting divorced, having problems at work) that could have happened

I believe anyone involved in the medical field needs the information about compassion fatigue due to its importance. It affects everyone involved in the health care field including all staff, patients, and even the organization itself. I believe not only the clinical staff but also the administrative staff should have yearly mandatory in-services on the subject of compassion fatigue. I also believe it is important for the board members to have all of the information on compassion fatigue, because organizational symptoms include high absenteeism, lack of vision for future of the company, negativism towards management, lack of flexibility among staff members, inability of staff to respect deadlines, inability of staff to complete assignments,

I believe it to be more a lack of emotion due to frequently endured traumas in the field. In a situation where you’re able to say, “Dr. Don used to react so much more to death five years ago. But he seems to be numb now,” you may be witnessing compassion fatigue manifest in lack of emotion. It’s not that Dr. Don no longer cares; It’s that he no longer feels the need to, or has the will to, express emotions toward the situation. This can pose a lot of issues in the long run. Unwillingness to express emotion can turn to depression, anxiety, lethargy, and self-loathing. But let’s look at the other side and examine why there are those that call it a myth.

Compassion fatigue, sometimes called secondary trauma, is when an individual is around a person’s/people’s trauma so that that they themselves begins to be impacted emotionally, mentally, spiritually, and/or relationally. A person can also experience a form of compassion fatigue, known as vicarious trauma, when a traumatic event doesn’t happen to them directly but they do witness the event. Individuals like caregivers, doctors, counselors, social workers, chaplains, etc. are very susceptible to compassion fatigue because in their line of work caring for individuals who have been traumatized is come place.

Studies have shown that the development of compassion satisfaction can effectively decrease the occurrences of compassion fatigue and burnout (Collins & Long, 2003). Eastwood & Ecklund (2008) found that compassion satisfaction was negatively correlated with burnout among residential treatment childcare workers. Melamed, Szor, & Bernstein (2001) determined that compassion satisfaction for mental health professionals at outpatient facilities was not only inversely correlated with burnout, but also to feelings of loneliness. Compassion satisfaction was similarly found to decrease the effects of burnout for clinicians working with adolescent sex-offenders (Kraus, 2005). Another study, which examined child welfare workers, showed that compassion satisfaction was correlated with lower reports of burnout and compassion fatigue (Van Hook & Rothenberg, 2009). Overall, compassion satisfaction is a promising idea for nurses to strive for in order to protect against compassion fatigue and burnout.

Compassion fatigue is the combination of physical, emotional, and spiritual depletion associated with caring for patients in significant emotional pain and physical distress (Anewalt, 2009; Figley, 1995). It is something that can happen to any nurse being overwhelmed in one or more areas of life and/or work. There are multiple ways a nurse can cope with compassion fatigue, and the article gives two great case studies. The first is of the reactive nurse who ultimately runs away from her issues but never truly fixes why she had the fatigue at all. The second is of a proactive nurse who used the resources provided to pull out of the fatigue and ended up in a better position because of it. Some keys points are made about

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

“Cold-blooded” would be the most appropriate adjective to describe the seven-year-old Tina. Throughout my childhood, I had been very reluctant to feel or show any emotions since I believed that emotions symbolized weaknesses while compassion had no practical use. However, my perception of empathy changed dramatically since I came to Havergal. I was shocked at first by how emotional girls here were. I remembered the moments when a girl started crying while discussing her privileges and responsibilities to the world and when girls wept for the moving speeches at sister prayer and Holocaust prayer. These expressions of emotions gradually reshaped me – day by day I have discovered my emotional bond

The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate an understanding of compassion, its importance and effects in health care.

Parkway has always had outstanding patient care, and no substantiated claim of abuse or neglect in any of its homes has ever been made, but the need for increased documentation will still affect the company. As the federal government tries to trim Medicare expenses, Parkway may face a reduction in funding.

Parkway Nursing Care is an organization facing a massive change. The company was founded in 1972 with just two nursing homes in Phoenix, Arizona. The company was very successful, and throughout the 1980s it continued to turn a consistent profit while slowly acquiring or building 30 more units. This low-profile approach changed forever in 1993 when venture capitalist Robert Quine decided to make a major investment in expanding Parkway in return for a portion of its profits over the coming years. The number of nursing homes exploded, and Parkway was operating 180 homes by the year 2000.