Al Gini wrote the book, ‘The importance of being lazy: In praise of play, leisure, and vacations’… I keep a copy of this in plain sight in my family room. I find that visitors are often drawn to pick it up. Why? I suppose because we don’t talk enough about the this side of life. One review of the book, http://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/books/books.php?id=5960, considers differences among nations in the emphasis given to talking about leisure. I thought about this as I was reading the results of some recent research that addresses compassion fatigue among nurses.
Compassion fatigue is the experience of too much of the emotion–compassion–causing anger and helplessness. Compassion fatigue is a condition observed among some types of jobs and professions more often than others. Nurses often experience this as a response to situations where they know that no matter what they do, the outcome for a patient is not going to be a good one. Not surprisingly, compassion fatigue relates to burnout and job dissatisfaction. But research has consistently shown that giving nurses a chance to talk about their experiences helps lessen the fatigue of feeling compassionate for those they care for… And, putting more emphasis on life outside of the workplace and nursing, learning to play and make mini-vacations out of an afternoon reduces the stress felt from caring for others…
Compassion fatigue as we learned in class seems like a serious matter, especially among the nurses who help handle the lives of people. I think it is a good idea for the nurses to have a support group within the hospital to talk about their experiences in order to come up together with possible ideas that can reduce compassion fatigue. The Transtheoretical Model stages I think goes hand in hand with the nurses trying to collaborate and make a positive change within their work environment.
Precontemplation: the nurses don’t really see their actions as harmful and are too busy with their job to notice the onset of compassion fatigue
Contemplation: the nurses start to see that they cannot complete their daily tasks as efficiently and start to realize that they have to look at what they are doing to make them feel so drained
Preparation: The nurses possibly at this stage are coming up with solutions that they can use addressing the compassion fatigue
Action: the nurses start talking about their experiences and life outside the workplace (as the blog said) to reduce the amount of stress
Maintenance: the nurses hopefully continue the support talks and sharing experiences to insure they will not become fatigued
Termination: although it is very unlikely that a nurse with her type of job can completely eliminate compassion fatigue from her life, they can reduce it significantly if they follow their procedure for recovery
Compassion fatigue is something we have been talking some about in class and it caught my attention because I had never thought about the concept before. I thought about this and how it applies to the stages of change that we talked about last week during class. Looking at the stages, they all fall into what someone suffering from compassion fatigue should look into and try. It is important to develop strategies to cope with the everyday grind of being a nurse and the emotional baggage that comes with it. Adapting to your workplace and knowing when to detach from it all and when one needs to be emotionally involved. Getting emotionally involved in every single patient, I believe emotions and an inability to control them can be a big contributor to compassion fatigue in nurses. Maintaining these steps can help someone sort through difficult times emotionally.
We have been learning about compassion fatigue a lot lately and I am finding it more and more interesting. It is almost like compassion fatigue comes from having to give too much passion to others while not receiving any (or at least the same amount) in return. If this is a true part of the definition of compassion fatigue, what would be the ratio of giving compassion to receiving compassion necessary in order to avoid compassion fatigue? Would it be 1:1 or something less like 2:1. I think that this would be an interesting research point of someone could put a quantitative spin on the data collected.