Every afternoon, personal support worker Susan (name changed) struggled with administering medication to a particular elderly patient in the dementia ward where she worked. On one such occasion, fed up with the patient’s behaviour, Susan became so frustrated that she mumbled a profanity, reached over, and pinched the patient’s arm. With a sharp cry of pain, the patient quickly accepted the medication and Susan was able to move on.

Stories of malpractice or poor patient care like this are not as uncommon as one might imagine. Evident from media reports of negligence in hospital settings, such cases can ignite an outcry in the community and prompt questions about individuals’ suitability for caretaking roles. How could someone with a career revolving around caring for others lack empathy?

Grace, an Ontario care worker who witnessed Susan’s behavior firsthand, believes the demanding nature of the job took a physical and mental toll on her co-worker. Having worked for eight years at a residential center for dementia patients, Grace knows from experience just how mentally exhausting the work can be. In an interview with the Trauma and Mental Health Report, Grace explained:

“There’s so much to take care of with these particular patients. When it’s dinnertime, you have to make sure to clean the patient, take them to the dining room, prepare the area for them, feed them, etc. But the next thing you know, they may have soiled themselves or vomited and you have yet another thing to clean when you already have so much to do… There are times when you need to take dirty clothing or dishes from them and they refuse to give them to you or just start yelling at you.”

When faced with the same situation on a daily basis, Grace explains that it’s hard not to become exasperated:

“It can get annoying and even angering at times. It’s hard to control… I didn’t hear much from Susan when I first started working here, but then she began yelling at the patients. I do believe it’s because the stress finally got to her.”

Mental health professionals support Grace’s theory. Overworked employees who are plagued by such feelings of frustration are showing signs of Compassion Fatigue (CF).

Francoise Mathieu, CF specialist and founder of Compassion Fatigue Solutions in Kingston, Ontario, describes the condition on her organization’s website as a gradual emotional and physical exhaustion of helping professionals. While CF is sometimes used interchangeably with Vicarious Trauma (VT), there is a difference between the two. VT is a secondary form of post-traumatic stress disorder, where a worker becomes preoccupied with a specific event or patient problem. On the other hand, CF is an overall decline in the ability to empathize with others.

The American Institute of Stress also differentiates CF from ‘burnout’. With CF, the constant pressure to show compassion toward patients may wear on mental energy stores, leading workers to become emotionally blunted to people and events. Burnout is less dependent on this loss of compassion.

CF is not limited to mental health professionals. It has been shown to affect teachers, social workers, police officers, prison guards, and even lawyers who work with trauma victims. In Grace’s words:

“At first, the stories you hear and the things you see involving the patients really do follow you home. They used to make me feel depressed. Over time, that sensitivity does lessen. After being exposed to this type of thing day after day, you start to lose those feelings.”

According to CF expert Francois Mathieu, once workers begin to experience this emotional exhaustion, they may be prone to moodiness, irritability, difficulty concentrating, intrusive thoughts, feelings of hopelessness, and apathy in both workplace and personal relationships. Fran McHolm, Director of Continuing Education at the Nurses Christian Fellowship has written about how CF can lead to a decrease in general employee happiness, workplace satisfaction, and quality of patient care.

CF is not a rare condition. Results from a 2012 dissertation study by Shannon Abraham-Cook at Seton Hall University show that, out of 111 urban public school teachers in Newark, New Jersey, 90% were at high-risk for CF. In 2010, Crystal Hooper and colleagues from the AnMed Health Medical Center in South Carolina also found that 86% of emergency department nurses exhibited moderate to high levels of CF.

While CF is common in many workplaces, help for employees who are experiencing symptoms, is not readily available. In an interview with the Trauma and Mental Health Report, Isabella, an assistant teacher working with special needs children at a Toronto daycare, describes her experience:

“When we began training, the instructors only talked about how to care for the children and how to work with the different age groups. Management didn’t provide us with anything else. The only thing we can do when feeling overly stressed is go for a break.”

Grace adds that her center for dementia patients fails to directly address employee needs:

“Recently, they added cameras everywhere to prevent poor patient care, but it’s made things worse. Now we are forced to seem especially compassionate and the littlest mistake can lead to a suspension. The management doesn’t try to understand the worker’s view of things at all.”

Dan Swayze, vice president of the Center for Emergency Medicine of Western Pennsylvania, discusses several ways management can address employees’ personal needs pertaining to compassion fatigue. In an article in the Journal of Emergency Medical Services, Swayze writes about the importance of implementing policies and developing programs that can help ease the onset of CF. Teaching employees how to set professional boundaries with patients, conducting meetings to solve individual client issues as a team, and offering counselling services to stressed employees are just a few options administration can take.

And a 2015 study by researcher Patricia Potter and colleagues in the Journal of Continuing Education in Nursing argues for resilience training, a program designed to educate personnel about CF and its risk factors. Workers are taught how to employ relaxation techniques and build social support networks to cope with symptoms that arise from working with difficult populations. Staff members from a US medical center who participated in the training self-reported an increase in their empathy and overall emotional health.

Volunteer crisis hotline operator, Anabel, explains the benefits of these resources in her line of work:

“The staff at the distress center are really considerate of their volunteers. In the training they prepare you for compassion fatigue, encourage volunteers to take care of themselves, and to not take the calls home with you. They also make sure to be available to the volunteers 24/7 in case they need to debrief a call with someone. It really helps to know they’re there to talk to—often after a distressing call.”

Training and intervention programs can help safeguard against the development of compassion fatigue in care workers. But many people working in the field, like Grace and Isabella, have been thrown into care-taking roles with no consideration for the risks to their mental wellbeing. Both women have identified various ways of coping as a stopgap until they receive the assistance and support they need.

Isabella suggests taking full advantage of breaks every few hours:

“Whenever you feel overwhelmed, go for a break right away—even if it’s just to the washroom or for a coffee… When you leave and come back, you feel refreshed. I’m lucky that I live so close to my workplace that I can go home during lunch.”

Grace recommends taking a deep breath and focusing on any positive aspect of the job:

“I learn so much from the patients. Hearing their stories, you can end up getting really close to some of them. I try to listen to them when I can and when I see the positive effect that has on them, I feel very fulfilled.”

These coping mechanisms do not work for everyone, which is why early intervention is so important. While camera implementation has prevented some inappropriate conduct like Susan’s from continuing, it doesn’t address the root problem.

“There are times where I get angry,” Grace admits. “I can’t always entertain patients or be friendly. I try… but it’s so hard… I know a lot of people, like myself, are really sensitive, which is why we are so emotionally affected by this job. There’s no stress management or counselling here, but… these training programs could really help.”

For many helping professionals, compassion fatigue may be inevitable. Cases like Susan’s show that the wellbeing of individuals in caretaking roles directly influences the quality of care that patients will receive. Support in the form of training programs and other preventative measures can make a difference in the lives of these workers, and, improve patient care.

– Anjali Wisnarama, Contributing Writer

Image Credit
Feature: Pennsylvania National Guard at flickr, Creative Commons
First: Ulrich Joho at flickr, Creative Commons
Second: Ulrich Joho at flickr, Creative Commons