The Importance Of Compassion Fatigue

Nursing is a caring profession; people who practice in the field generally have a desire to assist others with their knowledge and to apply those skills to improve the outcomes and conditions for their patients. Often nurses can experience through empathy, the patients circumstances and in so doing they begin to devise a care plan to ameliorate the defect in the patient’s holistic health. These attributes are individualized components to the caregiver’s persona, and by current definition of empathy, some are thought to experience increased feeling of guilt with more intense feelings of empathy. These feelings of guilt can occur through observations of inequity or the patient’s negative state. The intensity, frequency, and circumstantial conditions along with the caregiver’s characteristics to feel compassion can lead to compassion fatigue, or secondary trauma stress. …show more content…
Compassion fatigue is generally a sudden onset and a potential response to situations that have left one feeling guilty for circumstances, in which the outcome was less than optimal. Conditions of repetitive less than desirable results have an effect on the psyche of the caregiver. The evidence will suggest that compassion fatigue is a condition that needs much more exploration in an effort to devise real solutions to problems that have not been explored to the depths their essence. The available literature in studies and review has only spanned a ten-year period and thus may not represent the gravity of the situation and therefore the focus of recognizing and alleviating the condition is perceived to be