Every nurse knows what compassion fatigue is.
Even if you haven’t heard the term thrown around in the health and wellness arena, you can feel the meaning in your bones.
You’re a nurse.
You spend a lot of time being compassionate.
You know the fatigue that can come from it.
And then, to add insult to injury, we feel guilty for being so exhausted by compassionate care. This is, after all, what we signed up. Intellectually, we WANT to be compassionate but emotionally we sometimes feel like it is killing us.
The reality is that compassion fatigue exists on a spectrum with compassion satisfaction at one end and burnout at the other. Some days we may be perilously close to the burnout edge while other days we are cruising toward satisfaction.
Many nurses hang out right in the middle for a long time. This doesn’t feel terrible but certainly doesn’t feel great either.
To be clear, this isn’t a moral continuum. It isn’t a pull between good and evil, it doesn’t define our worth or value as a nurse or as a person.
This spectrum is an emotional/mental wellness spectrum. It is about how we FEEL in our work. Unfortunately, the closer we get to burnout and the longer we stay there, the more physical symptoms emerge. To add insult to injury, research shows that working with burnout can result in poor patient outcomes and increase medical errors.
So, what do we do about it?
The answer to compassion fatigue is…drumroll please…
Compassion Satisfaction.
Chances are, despite all the times you have heard about compassion fatigue, you have not heard about compassion satisfaction.
It’s exactly what it sounds like.
But how do we just magically get compassion satisfaction when the compassion fatigue is beating us down?
It is easier than you may think, and it’s summed up in one phrase,
Celebrate them, celebrate you.
Celebrate the patient wins, not just with praise to the patient but sharing the POSITIVE stories with your coworkers. Talk about how your patient overcame something big, or finished treatment, or maybe the win is that they remain stable. If you are in management, celebrate the wins and strengths of your staff.
Celebrate you. Acknowledge the part you play in the patient’s (or staff’s) journey. Acknowledge the part you play in your team of coworkers. Acknowledge that despite all the hard things you do, there is so much good.
Give equal airtime to the good stories, not just the catastrophic ones.
Just doing this one thing can change your whole experience at work. It can help you inch away from compassion fatigue and burnout and toward health.
And isn’t this what you want?
Are you too fatigued to even try these types of strategies? I understand because I have been there too. You don’t have to do it alone and you don’t even need to figure out how to do it. Reach out to book a call. Even if we aren’t a good fit to work together, the hour won’t be wasted. In that time I can help you get clarity on why what was once easy for you to do is now sucking the life out of you, and what steps specifically can be taken to reverse that trajectory. You can love the work you’re doing. Click here to schedule a time today.
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