Major Factors In Law Enforcement : Compassion Fatigue And Law Enforcement

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.

New workers in the health care role are often excited, energetic, and ready to take on whatever comes at them. Little do they know compassion fatigue is nipping at their heels. Compassion fatigue is common among health care providers and consists of five major concepts. These five concepts are ambiguity, no-win situations, role overload, role conflict, and not being adequately recognized. Researching concepts of compassion fatigue looks at the nature and causes along with the physical, emotional, and spiritual needs. To deal with and cope there needs to be strategies and resources that can be utilized to keep from burnout.

Human service workers are likely to intervene with people with serve psychological and physical traumatic problems connected with sexual and physical assault, murder, Alzheimer’s disease, and AIDS (James and Gilliland, 2013). As a result of this involvement, the professional may develop secondary traumatic stress disorder or vicarious traumatization and compassion fatigue. However, these terms are used interchangeably to describe what is going on when the crisis worker-client relationship becomes pathological. Therefore, it is imperative for human service professionals to be made aware of the signs and symptoms, not only for the benefit of their clients but for themselves and their colleagues as well. One method that professionals can use to

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 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

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

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

Although nursing is a varied profession, compassion fatigue is experienced across all specialties and is a relatively new acknowledgement of symptoms. “Compassion fatigue is the term used to describe a combination of burnout and secondary traumatic stress. Burnout is composed of three constructs: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and diminishing ones accomplishments” Maslach, Schaufeli & Leiter, (2001). On the contrary and not thoroughly studied is compassion satisfaction. “While CF describes some of the occupational hazards of nursing, compassion satisfaction (CS) encompasses the pleasure of gratitude that develops from caregiving for patients” (Simon, Pryce, Roff & Klemmack 2005). This term of compassion satisfaction is interchangeable

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

Compassion fatigue can lead to less productivity and increased staff turnover, leading to costly financial consequences for healthcare institutions.

Compassion fatigue is a term that defines how nurses will often ignore their own emotions and feelings in order to care for others. The term also defines the nurse that is worn down, angry, distressed, and

Many officers have a difficulty dealing with the stress they face on the job and understanding ways to cope with this stress. One factor of this stress is having the ability to keep work separate from family life. It is crucial that an individual working within the police force comprehends the importance of ensuring they keep family and work separate. This allows an officer to be able to go home after a long shift and try to forget about their hectic day at work and focus solely on their families. Police officers do not have set hours to work they do shift work. They are often assigned to a shift whether that is nights, morning, midday, afternoons and they must work regardless of holidays, special occasions etc. The family of the officer may feel as if the officer is putting work above family life. The solution to this is having a balance between working and spending time with family. The time an officer does get off he or she should spend that time focusing on their families and spending time together to help cope with the stress of always being at work. Coming home from a high stress job to something that essentially makes an individual happy and stronger is a good way to minimize the stress. Shift work, for example, was found to be a contributing factor to an increase in metabolic syndrome, a cluster of symptoms that includes abdominal obesity, hypertension, insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes and stroke. (Violanti John, CBC.com) The duties of a police officer could bring a lot of misery to an individual when having to witness shootings, stabbings or more sever deaths. Part of a police officers job is to be able to handle this type of unfortunate circumstance but sometimes it is a lot harder when an individual steps foot into reality and has to tell a family their son, daughter, wife, husband has passed away in a shooting

With compassion fatigue being a fairly new concept in the nursing profession, the urgency to gain knowledge on this topic is imperative as documented cases of suffering are on the rise. Merriam-Webster (2018) defines compassion as the sympathetic consciousness of other’s distress together with a desire to alleviate it. Notably, compassion is foundational in nursing which makes the definition essential. According to Kelly and Todd (2017), compassion fatigue is both a psychological and physiological response to chronic emotional and interpersonal stresses that affect those in the Caregiving profession. Influenced by direct patient care, nurses are predisposed to physical and emotional distress (Melvin, 2015). Furthermore, this concept is greater defined by Christina Melvin as an exhaustion to those exposed to “seriously ill, traumatized,

Stress counseling has become a staple in the status quo of law enforcement. This is due to the discovery of post-shooting trauma that exists with officers who have experienced a justified homicide. It tends to stick with many of them, the stress and negative feelings surfacing through dreams, flashbacks and could result in hesitance to perform in like manner in the future. To counteract this, agencies require that the officers who exhibit these symptoms and others to undergo stress counseling and either use an impartial internal counselor or outsource to local counselors to conduct the sessions and sign off on officers who are competent enough to return to work. Due to the untrusting nature of police officers, it's difficult to get them to

In conclusion, police and correctional officers deal with stress every day whether it’s work-related or individual. It’s essential for the officer to identify and recognize the stressors and have appropriate strategies to assist with controlling and decrease the stress they are experiencing. If they do not have methods or techniques then the stress can have an effect on the officer that can jeopardous their health, decision-making, and the efficiency of their work. Once stress is acknowledged, officers can work to effectively