Compassion Fatigue in Nursing
Jo Walton
There is a sentimental idea in many of our minds that nurses are the epitome of caring professionals: gentle, kind, friendly, compassionate, empathetic, capable and calm. Certainly this is an ethos that the profession attempts to live up to, and many of us would also add that nurses need to be skilful, articulate, courageous, ethical and resilient. The expectation that nurses will provide compassionate, respectful and trustworthy care is spelled out in the profession's Code of Conduct. The Code is framed around core values of respect, trust, partnership and integrity, and although the word 'compassion' is not used, it is inherent in the whole code, and nurses know they have a professional responsibility to live up to this standard.
In spite of expectations and codes sometimes nurses slip up and may behave in ways that are less than ideal. Sometimes their heart simply isn't in their work. As human workers and human beings, nurses, like everyone, are fallible. The very idea that nurses might lose compassion, become tired of caring, be at any time unable to give unconditional regard to patients and families is actually a rather frightening one. Nurses are people on whom any of us might (and do) depend in times of extremis, when sick, frightened, in pain, vulnerable, perhaps alone, whether as patients or as relatives or friends of those in need of care and protection.
Why would things go wrong in this way? I suggest there are three factors at play when compassion fatigue appears amongst nurses: the nature of nursing work itself, work demands and overload, and systems and institutional values that operate at odds with the values of nurses themselves.
Nursing work involves extensive elements of emotional labour. In their everyday work nurses deal with sensitive and intimate aspects of life, much of it in the domain of the private, often invisible and unspoken. While it is quite normal to discuss the fact that patients and families are troubled by fear, grief, sadness, it is less common for nurses to talk about the abject emotions they experience themselves. Anger, surprise, fear, dread, sympathy, joy are acceptable topics, but revulsion, repulsion, disgust, horror, terror, and libidinous arousal are not so easily slipped into a conversation, even an earnest one.
The mechanisms nurses employ to deal with the abject, and the fear and the anxiety that their work entails, have been explored both psychoanalytically and sociologically. Over several decades the received wisdom that nurses ought to conceal all their emotional reactions has been changing, and nurses now may (at times) laugh or cry with patients and families in their care. Nevertheless a full range of emotional expression would derail professional comportment and be counter to the value systems that hold the profession together. To work at their best nurses must hold their emotions in.
At the same time, nursing work itself is emotionally laden, driven as it is by the desire to help, to serve, to tend, to be compassionate (a voluminous literature backs this idea), in combination with an interest in things medical and mysterious, psychological and deep, bizarre and exotic and dangerous.
But it is not just disease and disability, sickness and health that nurses must deal with. There are also different needs and expectations of patients and the increasingly production-conscious environment in which nurses work. As financial pressures squeeze our health systems tighter, and the pressure for increased work volumes increases, nurses often feel they must ration care. Care rationing means that they must decide whose needs are most urgent and what care can and must be left undone. It means deciding what words can be left unspoken, what comfort can wait until later. It is a dreadful situation for nurses, patients and families to be in. While nurses are balancing unseen demands, patients and families are experiencing things rather differently. Time drags for those who are ill or waiting, but not for the staff who are preoccupied with getting everything done, who know that they must balance this patient's needs against that one's, this emergency over that potential problem.
In situations such as this nurses can feel overwhelmed by helplessness, frustration, tiredness and tedium. Lack of insight develops and ordinariness takes over. People who do not feel valued, who do not have the resources they need, who feel helpless to change things do not make good, compassionate, care workers. Emotional control can break down, and a desire not to care can creep in, when the load becomes too great to bear.
Nursing is hard work. Physically, psychologically, emotionally and spiritually. A firm sense of one's own values, driven and backed by a strong spiritual faith is some defence against failure, provides some insurance, some inoculation in terms of what is right and proper and why we chose this work. Compassion fatigue is a sign that health workers themselves need some help, care and relief. It is also a 'canary in the mine' signal that a larger system is in serious danger.
Jo Walton is Professor of Nursing in the Graduate School of Nursing, Midwifery and Health at Victoria University of Wellington and Deputy Chair of the Nursing Council of New Zealand.