Combating Compassion Fatigue - Essay Example

"Combating Compassion Fatigue" is a perfect example of a paper on the health system. Compassion fatigue, also called the stress of caring too much, is a situation in which medics find themselves quite often. It happens when a doctor or nurse develops an attachment with his/her patients, which is a good thing, but gets frustrated when things do not quite work out; this happens through reduced personal accomplishment, exhaustion, and depersonalization (Espeland, 2006). The result is that the medic’s health and professional work are compromised. This paper presents an analysis of various factors related to compassion fatigue.

Warning Signs for Five Major Concepts of Compassion Fatigue

The major concepts of compassion fatigue can be categorized into five groups as follows:

1. Cognitive

The victim experiences reduced self–esteem, and self-worth. Their concentration span and focus levels reduce so much that it affects their performance. The result is decreased performance at work; this can be indicated by low morale, absenteeism, or unexplained negativity at work.

1. Emotional

This impacts the medic’s emotional health and includes anxiety, anger, depression, powerlessness, and sadness. Examples of such include the doctor having dreams which are similar to a patient’s or remembering a frightening experience while attending to a patient.

1. Behavioral

The individual’s behavior changes; it could include increased irritability, appetite change, withdrawal, isolation, moodiness, and hypervigilance.

1. Spiritual

The victim’s spiritual orientation changes drastically; he or she questions religious beliefs and life’s meaning, loses hope and purpose, and becomes highly skeptical.

1. Somatic

The victim’s body experiences unusual changes such as breathing difficulties, heavy sweating, decreased immunity, rapid heartbeat, and insomnia.

Physical, Emotional, and Spiritual Needs of the Caregiver

In order to avoid compassion fatigue, caregivers’ emotional, physical, and spiritual needs should be satisfied. This can be done as follows:

1. Developing a peaceful mind that is focused on peaceful thoughts. Gupta & Woodman state that this can be accomplished by undertaking activities that help relax the mind such as listening to quiet music and meditation. Sharing experiences with colleagues, interacting with enthusiastic people, embracing humor, and keeping daily journals may also help to satisfy the caregiver’s emotional needs (2010).
2. Medical staff can take care of their physical needs by eating well, doing exercises, getting proper rest and sleep while necessary, as well as ensuring that they attend to their emotional needs.
3. Just like every other human, caregivers have spiritual needs that must be attended to (Bush, 2006). This, however, is an individual’s prerogative since people have different spiritual needs. As such, each and every practitioner should identify a source of spiritual nourishment and embrace it. This can mainly be done by ensuring that the workplace provides an enabling environment for everyone to pursue their spiritual needs.

Copying Strategies

Caregivers can engage any of the following approaches to help manage work-related stress:

1. Boundary demarcation: it involves ‘blocking’ certain undesirable events or memories (Huster & Ansley, 2010). An example of boundary demarcation is 'curious oblivion', which allows caregivers to wipe the memories of dead patients, hence enables them to focus their attention on their current patients (Ekedahl & Wengström, 2008).
2. Reconstruction: this strategy involves making repairs where damages have or are in the course of occurring. Whereas it can be done in a group, it is mostly an individual effort. This reconstruction is mainly done with the help of the hospital’s chaplaincy. The chaplain helps the caregiver evaluate his or her professional and private lives (Chen, Lin, Wang, & Hou, 2009).

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