Compassion Fatigue In Nursing

THESIS STATEMENT: Hospitals should improve staff allocation as it can be detrimental to not only patients but also employee 's work performance and health, hospitals need to hire additional staff or better manage their current employees.

What was once thought of as a profession driven by compassion and the desire to help those in need has now become filled with weary burnt out nurses who have lost sight of their purpose. Stress has caused them to distance themselves from the principles nursing is built upon. Our health care system needs to be revamped to improve the quality of care being administered. Nurses can be proactive and take steps to avoid burning out but, our health care administrators have to take matters into their hands because they have the capacity to initiate change. They must realize the gravity of the situation and take an offensive position to make a stand against the crisis of nursing

This chapter provides a background of nurse burnout and their effect on quality of care

When one thinks about nursing, caring, empathy, and compassion come to mind. There is a link, an unbreakable union, for nurses that "compassion fatigue is the cost of caring for others in pain" (Boyle, 2015, p. 49). Compassion fatigue (CF) and its impact on nurses are predominant problems in many Emergency Departments (ED). Nurses perform a number of procedures throughout the day, but primarily the thing that they deliver the most is themselves (Harris & Quinn-Griffin, 2015). Nurses give care, succor, kindness, and tenderness to patients, families, other nurses; support to doctors and advanced practitioners, and give directions to medical technicians, nursing assistants, and other staff every

In America, people all over the world deals with stress. Being a nurse is a stressful job. Being stress can be fatigue and even cause ill health for an individual. Stressing in the environment can cause employees to stressful situations causing difficult health, and safety problems not only for the nurses, but also for their patients. Many workers suffer from stress. It is important to identify why nurses are becoming stressed and how to reduce work related stress.

This journal entry will discuss a follow-up with the instructor about the issues from a previous assignment and clarify some questions about the final research proposal due in week six. In addition, some of the problems are the hypothesis and framework to finish the final paper. After talking to the instructor, she pointed out that the self-care deficit theory could help tie up some loose ends and finding resources that support that will help to put my final proposal together. Furthermore, the journal articles and other data collected discuss self-care and compassion fatigue and burn out and all the information that has been gathered should be enough to write the final research proposal.

Monday October 26th: Today at Moses Cone hospital, I was in the role of student nurse. I had two patients; one a returning patient, and the other a new patient. The nurse I was working with is someone I have never worked with before or even seen on the floor, but she seemed to be familiar with the unit.

Palliative care continues to evolve in providing better end-of-life care and so does nursing care. Thus, nursing practice is enhanced to satisfy the demand of the palliative care. A nurse provides complex care and fulfils the needs of the patients. Nursing involves in caring work, which focus on patient experiencing agony in palliative and haematological cancer care. Nurses worked in a taxing environment, that can be highly stressful, and often they experience physical, psychological and spiritual exhaustion. This nature of work can have devastating effects on the health and wellbeing of a nurse. There are three concepts related to adverse consequences of caring work: these are compassion fatigue, burnout and vicarious traumatization.

There are many factors that contribute to patient outcomes. If nurses and healthcare providers are experiencing patient burnout, how will that affect patient outcomes? We all know where this is going. Patient burnout may cause patient outcomes to be poor.

Burnout is classified viewed in three phases. The first phase of burnout is the arousal phase. The nurse shows anxiety, insomnia, forgetfulness, inability to concentrate, feelings of beings overwhelmed, frustration, sadness, and new physical symptoms, such as headaches and stomach problems. If the nurse does not recognize that these symptoms require intervention, the second phase is energy conservation. In this phase, the nurse starts to call in sick to work; o she may be chronically late getting to duty. Deadlines are not met, a cynical or resentful attitude develops, a persistent sense of fatigue pervades both are the nurse’s personal and professional’s life.

The strains on the healthcare field can eventually lead to physical,mental and emotional exhaustion also known as burnout. As caretakers,educators,and lifelines, nurses are responsible for the many roles they carry as they continue to give care to patients day in and day out. One of the most common reasons nurses are stressed is the patient to nurse ratio. For instance, a nurse may be taking care of 6 patients when he or she should only be taking care of 4.

My concept is compassion fatigue. Compassion fatigue (CF) as it relates to nurses working in an emergency department dealing with secondary trauma causing symptoms of compassion fatigue. The measurement tool, which I will use, is the Professional Quality of Life (ProQOL) scale. This scale has been in use since 1995 and has had several revisions, the last one updated in 2010 and it has been translated into 17 languages. The ProQOL measures compassion satisfaction (CS) and CF and its subcategories, burnout (BO) and secondary traumatic stress (STS). It is a pencil and paper Likert scale with 30 questions with 10 questions each reflecting CS, BO and STS. It was used by Potter, Deshields and Rodrigues (2013) in a pre-post test to establish if the resiliency program was successful and it was used more recently by Hunsaker, et al (2015) and Flarity, Holcomb and Gentry (2015) to measure the prevalence of compassion satisfaction and compassion fatigue among emergency room nurses and pre/post test to measure whether the intervention of a resiliency program had an impact on the nurses, respectively. The scale is readily available and easy to use and easy to self-score.

Generally, science such as medicine is highly supported by quantitative research and methodology.  According to Tinkle & Beaton, “it has been argued that there is an over-valuation of the empirical/quantitative view because it is seen as “true science” (as cited in McEwen & Wills, 2014, p. 17).  We see this with evidence based practice guidelines in several areas of nursing.  For example, at one time, we would treat fever in pediatric patients with aspirin.  We since have learned that this puts the child as risk for Reye’s syndrome.  When completing research on abstract subjects such as compassion fatigue, utilizing repeatable tools or instruments allows for qualitative information to be gathered and collated  in a quantitative manner to support

I thought about nursing burnout through watching the video by speaker Madelyn Blaire. Burnout is categorized as physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion. Burnout can lead to dulled emotions and detachment. I wonder why nurses are burning out.

Nurses fatigue is growing problem nurse face each day in the healthcare environment, and he can be caused by long hours, sleep deprivation, and possibly by accepting extra assignments can be dangerous for both nurses and patient. These inadequacies can result in major implications for the health and safety of registered nurses and can compromise patient care which can lead to fatalities. (American Nurses Association, 2014). In my experience, being fatigued from working much 12-hour shifts consecutively was very difficult as I felt extremely tired, resulting in lack of focus, missing important details during the handing over the process with impaired cognitive functioning. This I found was detrimental to the patients and myself as it impedes quality and has a deleterious effect on patient safety.