Moving from compassion fatigue to compassion resilience Part 2: Understanding compassion fatigue.
Year: 2019
Type: article
Abstract: The provision of companion animal veterinary care is a highly specialized field of care that offers immense joys and rewards — improving the health of animals, supporting the well-being of clients, and ultimately, preserving the human-animal bond. Caring for patients and clients can be tremendously satisfying, offering a sense of meaning, purpose, and difference-making incomparable to that which may be found in any other field, yet it can incur a cost, “the cost of caring,” (1) commonly known as compassion fatigue. Within the high care professions where empathy, compassion, and caring for others are at the core of practice, compassion fatigue is recognized as an occupational hazard (2). Almost everyone who cares for others in the high care professions will eventually experience some degree of compassion fatigue (3). As Remen (4) so aptly worded it, “The expectation that we can be immersed in suffering… and not be touched by it is as unrealistic as expecting to be able to walk through water without getting wet.”
The origin of compassion fatigue
The term compassion fatigue was first used in the context of a study of burnout in nurses nearly 3 decades ago. At that time, Joinson (5) coined the term to describe in nurses the “loss of the ability to nurture” (5,6). Since then, compassion fatigue has been recognized to affect not just nurses, but anyone who works in the caring professions including doctors, emergency care workers, hospice workers, police officers, firefighters, mental health workers, family therapists, and veterinarians and veterinary technicians, among others (6). The world renowned traumatologist, Charles Figley, who referred to compassion fatigue as “the cost of caring,” has defined it as “the deep physical, emotional, and spiritual exhaustion that can result from working day to day in an intense caregiving environment” (7).
Source: Europe PMC (PubMed Central)
Author: Debbie L Stoewen
Language: English
Subfield: Speech and Hearing
Field: Health Professions
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2982392005