The truth is every nurse in the world is affected by those they care for to some degree. Whether they have made you smile, broken your heart, or just pissed you off your patients have impacted you; but is it to the point of compassion fatigue? Maybe not everytime but from reading and talking to others I realize every nurse is bothered by symptoms associated with compassion fatigue at some point in their career, some more often or to a greater degree than their counterparts. But why?
As children, growing up we think of nurses in white dresses and little oddly shaped hats that work in the doctor’s offices and hospitals. The truth is nurses go beyond the hospitals and doctor’s offices to flight lines, law offices, rehab facilities, government agencies and much more. There are unlimited nursing specialties each as individual as the nurses practicing them. As with any career field there are some specialties considered more stressful than others. Recently I read “Nurses and Compassion Fatigue” by Laurie Barkin RN, MS in which I believe she summed it up nicely,
"It is difficult to assess how many nurses develop compassion fatigue. In a recent review of seven studies of secondary traumatic stress among nurses working in forensics, pediatrics, emergency medicine, hospice, ICU, and oncology, rates of secondary stress symptoms ranged from 25% to 78%. A study of emergency nurses, found that nearly 86% had moderate to high levels of compassion fatigue."
Well, it looks like ER might be at the top of the list for being affected by compassion fatigue. That's 8.6 out of every 10 nurses for emergency rooms! And those numbers provided by Barkin swing wildly: from 25 to 86%. I'd like to see some analysis related to this (maybe in a new post?) what could cause such a swing? How did she compile those statistics (does she say in her article?)...
ReplyDeleteRemind us: what department you work in? (Remember, new readers might access your blog the first time with this post...).
I use to work in an assisted living home and I worked in dinning services, I didn’t care for them like a nurse would, but I spend 3 hours a day with the patients. They were all dementia patients and depending on the level I worked on depended on how long or how effected they were by dementia. I got extremely attached to some of them. For example there was this one lady who would always make me come to her table to take her order she was my favorite, but she got to the point where she couldn’t feed herself. It broke my heart to see her like that and even though I wasn’t supposed to I helped her eat I did because I didn’t want her to be hunger. Also if I called a nurse to help her no one would really help they would tell me that she is fine. So I decided to help her I would take her spoon to break up her food and then put it in her mouth just like one would do with a baby.
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