Take Compassion Fatigue Case By Case
A byproduct of compassion-related fatigue is the tendency to start sifting people into particular labels because of a lack of energy or feelings of stress.
It becomes easier to abstract the patient who keeps hitting the call button, the family asking for updates, or even an aide taking a long time to finish a task.
Nurses can avoid this by taking their jobs case by case and day by day. It helps to make sure you view every patient as an individual with a unique set of symptoms or problems. When this feels impossible, it can be helpful to step away for a moment.
Ultimately, everyone benefits when you know how to acknowledge and address compassion fatigue.
Breaking Away From Compassion Fatigue
Not to worry though, as there is actually a way out of compassion fatigue. Below is a nurses guide, listed as ABC towards the prevention of compassion fatigue which stands for: awareness, balance, and connections.
Awareness
Be attentive to the signs of emotional instability towards your work. You can take some time to reflect on your thoughts and ask yourself the following questions.
- Are you tired all the time?
- Do you feel so apathetic to even the most pitiful cases of your patients?
- Are you struggling to get up to go to work on a daily basis?
- Do you feel like you are working so hard yet you dont feel any sense of accomplishment?
- Are you irritable in the workplace or outside of it?
- Does anything that you do in your job bores you enough that it robs you of your drive to do your best?
- Are you experiencing hypochondriac symptoms of pain and aches that you are not quite sure as to where it originated? The stress that you have would sometimes come out in another form of illness if left untreated.
Balance
It is all about shifting the paradigm into the positive note instead of allowing yourself to drown in the negativity of your thoughts.
Connections
Listen, someone else is willing to help you cope with your dilemma. You do not have to carry the burden alone.
Now what about us nurses? Of course, that plan sounds too good to be true, but no, such benefit and incentive doesnt exist in our field. But it never hurts to hint that as a wonderful suggestion, right?
Losing A Patient Suddenly And Unexpectedly
Losing a patient is a common trigger for compassion fatigue in nurses, especially if it feels like their death came out of nowhere. The shock from the experience can be so overwhelming that you just shut down. You put up walls between yourself and your patients so you donât get too close to someone else, only to lose them too.
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Compassion Fatigue From Unstable Management
Youll experience it at some point in any healthcare job: A manager you knew and loved leaves, and their replacement will be a manager who doesnt know the role, the hospital, or the team as well. This kind of change is inevitable, and often it can ultimately be beneficial to staff, but the transition period puts more pressures on you and your coworkers. You may feel a lack of guidance and assistance, or just more tasks in addition to your normal duties. Either way, new management can stretch healthcare workers thin, at least for a few weeks, and in that time youre more likely to experience fatigue.
How To Recognize Compassion Fatigue In Yourself
Its crucial that as a nurse, one understands how to recognize compassion fatigue not only in themselves but those they work with. There are many signs to look for when pinpointing whether you or someone else has compassion fatigue:
- Extreme exhaustion on a regular or daily basis
- Increased anger and irritability
- Lower levels of job satisfaction
- Reduced ability to feel empathy
- Disruption of world view irrational fears and extreme anxiety
- Dissociation
- Impaired ability to make well-informed decisions
- Difficulty separating work and personal lives
- Dread going to work
- Increase in work absences and showing up late
- Failure to commit to any overtime when asked multiple times
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What Can Nurses Do To Prevent Compassion Fatigue
There are many ways to promote healthy caregiving and build resilience against compassion fatigue. Below are three key ways you can prevent this condition.
Learning to set appropriate boundaries can help nurses balance their personal and professional involvement. There is a fine line between compassion and overinvolvement. The National Council of State Boards of Nursing defines professional boundaries as the limits that protect the space between the professionals power and the patients vulnerability.
Crossing professional boundaries can hurt the therapeutic nurse-patient relationship and harm your well-being. Legal issues, burnout, high staff turnover, moral distress, compassion fatigue and even adverse mental health outcomes can result if professional boundaries arent maintained.
To take care of others, you must first take care of yourself. During pre-flight safety instructions, you are told to put your oxygen mask on first before helping others. If you are incapacitated, you cannot help anyone else. The same is true in caregiving. You cannot keep giving to others if you do not give to yourself first.
In nursing, self-care is often neglected. Perhaps it is because nurses feel it is selfish, or they are physically and emotionally exhausted. Self-care is not an indulgence, but rather a daily discipline, like brushing your teeth.
Preventing Compassion Fatigue In Nursing Care Settings
Here are some suggestions for dealing with compassion fatigue in a nursing care environment:
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What Are The Signs Of Nurse Burnout
Nurse burnout manifests in different ways. Typically, nurses will exhibit behaviors that indicate both physical and emotional distress related to their job. For example, nurses may become listless and depressed or grow indifferent toward their patients. Other signs may include the following:
- Chronic fatigue
- A sense of dread about going to work
- Lack of joy on the job
Its not uncommon for nurses to work 12-hour shifts. While this can cause them to feel tired, under normal circumstances, they should have opportunities to recover and get needed rest. Temporarily feeling tired, however, differs from constant exhaustion. Nurses who struggle to carry out their regular daily routines due to fatigue may be experiencing burnout.
Additionally, nurses may occasionally feel irritable or worried throughout a demanding workday. Positive feelings, like gratification from a job well done, generally offset a nurses anxiety, but nurses experiencing burnout may find their sense of purpose replaced by frustration. Also, occasional days of dreading work or lacking enthusiasm no longer come and go, but stubbornly persist.
Other signs of burnout that nurse leaders can look for include the following:
- Regularly arriving to work late
- Taking excessive sick days
- Withdrawing from social activities at work
Seeing Or Hearing Something That Hits Too Close To Home
Sometimes compassion fatigue is triggered not just by a traumatic event, but by what that event reminds you of. This can happen when a patient looks like a loved one who died, or when theyâve gone through a trauma you went through yourself. Emotions surface and can throw you off. You start having nightmares and stop taking care of yourself. You go into work with a knot in your stomach and have to force yourself to go through the motions.
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Recognizing Compassion Fatigue Symptoms In Nursing
- It is common to see healthcare professionals present compassion fatigue symptoms.
- If untreated, compassion fatigue can negatively impact the quality of patient care delivered in a healthcare facility.
- Check out Nursing CE Central to learn more about compassion fatigue symptoms, their lasting impact if left untreated, and what you can do to help if you notice a colleague is struggling.
Morgan Curry, BSN / RN
Intensive Care, Outpatient Surgery, Aesthetics, Education, and Nursing Leadership
Compassion Fatigue Vs Burnout
Experiences of compassion fatigue in direct care nurses and burnout are often considered to be the same. However, fundamental differences exist between the causes. For example, compassion fatigue stems from the trauma or overwhelming feelings associated with helping others. It leads to nurses not practicing self-care.
In comparing compassion fatigue vs. burnout, its important to understand the onset of each. Compassion fatigue may come on suddenly in unpredictable ways. Burnout typically develops over time.
Factors associated with nurse burnout typically involve too much work or too many responsibilities. For example, a lack of control in a job, unclear job expectations, or dysfunction in the workplace can cause a nurse to experience burnout.
Compassion fatigue can result when nurses focus so much on helping other people that their own needs are not met. This leads to a decrease in activities that bring happiness and provide balance in life, possibly leaving individuals feeling like they have nothing left to give.
Burnout can also increase cynicism, making individuals believe that anything they do wont make an impact or difference. Nurses experiencing burnout often feel disillusionment about their job and sometimes leave the nursing profession.
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Get Help If You Need It
Talking to someone about what youâre going through is not weak. Having someone help you process traumatic events â either ones youâve experienced personally or witnessed on the job â can help protect you from experiencing compassion fatigue later on.
Originally published on Nov 05, 2019.
More:
Compassion Fatigue Vs Burnout: Whats The Difference
The term âburnoutâ has become something of a catch-all for feeling bogged down or stressed, but in reality, burnout is simply exhaustion, Figley says. Itâs the kind of tired you canât fix with a nap. Compassion fatigue is a special kind of burnout related specifically to your capacity to connect with and care for â and about â other people.
The two are often intertwined, so much so that it can be hard to distinguish between the two. The symptoms, after all, are similar. Both can cause tiredness, irritability, and apathy. You can also experience the two simultaneously, and experiencing one might increase your chances of developing the other.
But while similar, compassion fatigue and burnout are not the same, especially when it comes to their root causes. Burnout is often the result of widespread, systematic stress that leaves you feeling powerless, Hunsaker says. It comes on gradually, and rarely can you pinpoint a single reason behind it.
Learn more about how to prevent Nurse Burnout
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Definition Of Compassion Fatigue In Nursing
Compassion fatigue is defined as a combination of physical, emotional, and spiritual weariness or depletion associated with caring for emotionally and physically suffering and traumatized patients.
The concept was initially coined in the healthcare setting as a response to the large amounts of stress associated with caregiving and occurs when nurses witness suffering, illnesses, and trauma on an ongoing basis.
Compassion fatigue is an emotionally overwhelming and unavoidable part of caregiving.
While it turns out that every nurse is prone to this phenomenon, the vulnerability to compassion fatigue can be influenced by the nurses personality.
Notably, in the nursing literature, compassion fatigue has been variously defined and related to burnout, secondary traumatic stress, and vicarious traumatization.
Some elites have also used the concepts interchangeably to describe the phenomenon. In this regard, it is worth noting that, while the concepts are relatable, they are different.
Focus On Compassion Satisfaction
Although this can be a challenge, directing your thoughts to focus on the good and not the bad is vital in preventing compassion fatigue. Trust me.
Familiarity with the concept of compassion fatigue, along with the signs and symptoms, allows nurses and other care giving providers to recognize the concept within themselves and amongst their colleagues.
Therefore, the first step in reducing compassion fatigue is to acknowledge its existence.
Mental health resource, GoodTherapy, highlights several signs compassion fatigue symptoms that you should be aware of when working in the healthcare setting. These include:
- Chronic physical and emotional exhaustion
- Depersonalization
- Feelings of inequity toward the therapeutic or caregiver relationship
- Irritability
- Poor job satisfaction
Although some of these may seem ambiguous or similar to symptoms of other various conditions, compassion fatigue can be detrimental to the quality of care delivered to patients and can impact a healthcare provider significantly both in and outside of the workplace.
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Concept Of Compassion Fatigue
The effect of Compassion Fatigue is multifaceted, including physical, emotional, social, spiritual and intellectual effects. Symptoms of CF include boredom, cynicism, anxiety, discouragement, intrusive thoughts, irritability, avoidance, numbness, persistent arousal, sleep disturbances, depression, intolerance, detachment, apathy and, not least, a loss of compassion . Physical symptoms can include increased blood pressure, weight gain, fatigue, stiff neck, immune dysfunction and, an increase in gastrointestinal problems, cardiovascular disease and diabetes .
It has been shown that CF not only takes its toll on health care professionals on a personal level, but also on the workplace itself, causing more sick days, a higher turnover rate, decreased productivity , changes in job performance, patient dissatisfaction, poor professional judgment and an increase in mistakes .
In order to self-manage the emotional and physical symptoms of CF, there is concern that individuals may adopt ineffective coping strategies, such as avoidance, withdrawal and emotional numbing, which can then have a negative impact on the quality of care a patient receives .
Compassion Fatigue: Are You At Risk
For many of us, nursing isnt just what we do its who we are. Most of us became nurses because we care about people and want to make a difference in their lives.
Over time, nurses develop a nursing intuition and a working knowledge of disease and trauma. Our intuition, knowledge, and caring dont automatically shut off when we leave work. For example, have you ever seen a worrisome mole on a complete stranger?Have you felt concern about a friends weight or a neighbors smoking habits? Have you ever been in a public place when you heard someone coughingand wondered at what point you might intervene? These experiences are common among nurses. Yet, inability to shut off our knowledge and caring may leave us feeling emotionally saturated and raise our risk for compassion fatigue.
Ideally, as nurses, we should feel satisfied with our work and derive satisfaction from providing excellent care. Compassion fatigue has been defined as loss of satisfaction that comes from doing ones job well, or job-related distress that outweighs job satisfaction. Sometimes, merely being exposed to anothers traumatic experience leaves us feeling emotionally distraught. Called secondary traumatic stress, this is a part of compassion fatigue. As our sense of job satisfaction decreases, we may feel more burnout. A reaction to our work environment, burnout can stem from such conditions as short-staffing, long work hours, workplace incivility, and feeling dismissed or invalidated.
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Treating Compassion Fatigue Charles R Figley
Figley is one of the pioneers of traumatology research and theory, and this book is an extremely informative and comprehensive read for any trauma practitioner.
An impressive list of traumatology researchers have contributed to the bookâs 11 chapters, which cover compassion fatigue theory, research, and treatment.
Find the book on .
The Physical Effects Of Burnout
Signs of nurse burnout can manifest in physical symptoms. Nurses experiencing burnout may complain of:
- Digestive problems
- Disrupted sleep and insomnia
- Body aches
The chronic fatigue typical of nurse burnout can contribute to heart disease and high blood pressure. It may also make nurses more vulnerable to illnesses such as the flu.
Early identification of burnout can stem its progression. When nurse leaders recognize the signs of burnout, they can implement strategies that lower stress levels for nurses in distress. This can provide nurses with needed support that prevents the issue from getting out of control.
The cooperative nature of the nursing profession makes managing nurse burnout critical to maintaining a high level of care. Burnout reduces a nurses performance and concentration this, in turn, can negatively affect patient outcomes and compromise the work of other nurses working as a team.
Recognizing and managing burnout also protects the well-being of the nurses themselves. Health care organizations have an obligation to take the steps needed to shield nurses from the damaging effects of burnout.
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Availability Of Data And Materials
The qualitative datasets generated and/or analysed during this study are not publicly available as the participants were not informed that the data would be shared verbatim, but as anonymised quotations. The tables of quantitative data generated from analysing the completed questionnaires are available from the corresponding author KU, on reasonable request.
Factors Associated With Nurse Burnout
Typically, burnout occurs when nurses experience problems or an imbalance for a prolonged time period in one of the following areas:
Workload
Excessive work hours can easily lead to physical and mental fatigue. Long shifts can result in sleep deprivation and insufficient time to recover from the psychological stress inherent in nursing. Additionally, nurses assigned more responsibilities than they can handle or given insufficient resources to properly complete their duties may also experience high stress levels. If stress accumulates over time with little or no relief, nurses may develop burnout.
Control
To feel gratification in their work, nurses need to maintain a certain level of control over how they do their job. Micromanagement can deprive nurses of their autonomy a key element of job satisfaction. It also signals a lack of trust, potentially compounding nurses anxiety about their work and shaking their confidence.
Rewards
Hard work deserves fair compensation. Health care facilities that underpay nurses or fail to provide them with opportunities for promotions theyve earned diminishes job satisfaction. A lack of recognition can also leave nurses feeling undervalued and underappreciated.
Community
Fairness
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