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Compassion Fatigue Awareness for Aged Care Workforce

Sue Cosgrove • Feb 13, 2023

Two-way learning was happening when working with Aged Care teams for a week!

Hello - How are you?

What does it feel like to work in your space at the moment?

These are questions I could ask as I had many conversations with teams working in Aged Care over the previous week (February 6^th – 10^th) at 9 Aged Care Facilities.

I have been contracted to work within the Murrumbidgee Local Health District (MLHD) to Coach Aged Care teams and raise awareness of Compassion Fatigue's impact on the business they do.

It was a big week of learning for me as these teams were honest about how they felt about their work, fatigue, and the impact on their health and well-being.

To summarise the week:-

I created awareness and coached teams in Compassion Fatigue at 9 Aged Care facilities
I travelled 1, 471 km to meet these teams across the Riverina region
56 aged care team members across the region who were motivated to learn more about Compassion Fatigue and how they can work towards Compassion Satisfaction in their work and lives
56 pre-project surveys were completed to measure current levels of Compassion Fatigue and Compassion Satisfaction
56 people committed to their health and well-being and will attempt to experiment with solutions focused on self-care that will allow them to feel they have more energy for the work they do.

I look forward to reconnecting with these teams over the next 2 weeks as we will meet online as groups to discuss their experiments for self-care change. During this second session, people share their reflections on their experiments and decide if they stick with it or change to another solution. These sessions are a bit of fun as the group learns ideas from each other, checks in, discusses how work is going, and reflects on what else they can do for themselves. Such a magic time that this hard-working group of people don't usually get time to do – spend time focused on themselves!

Hopefully, this awareness, experiment and reflection cycle towards compassion satisfaction will create self-care change for aged care teams. Post the coaching and awareness intervention completion, the teams will be invited to complete a post-project survey to measure Compassion Fatigue and Compassion Satisfaction Scores for change.

This pre and post-intervention data will then be analysed to measure the impact of the intervention. Learning from this project will allow for changes to be made to the intervention and growth of the project. This ongoing coaching of aged care teams will reduce their fatigue and support them to stay in their work with compassion satisfaction.

To read more about the impact of Compassion Fatigue and Compassion Satisfaction on people and teams, look at these references:-

Abernathy, S., & Martin, R. (2019). Reducing compassion fatigue with self-care and mindfulness. Nursing2020 Critical Care, 14(5), 38-44. Reducing compassion fatigue with self-care and mindfulness : Nursing2020 Critical Care (lww.com)
Barnett, M. D., & Ruiz, I. A. (2018). Psychological distress and compassion fatigue among hospice nurses: the mediating role of self-esteem and negative affect. Journal of palliative medicine, 21(10), 1504-1506. Accessed at https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/jpm.2017.0662
Copeland, D. (2021). Brief workplace interventions addressing burnout, compassion fatigue, and teamwork: A pilot study. Western Journal of Nursing Research, 43(2), 130-137. Accessed at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0193945920938048?journalCode=wjna
Stamm, B.H. (2010). The Concise ProQOL Manual, 2nd Ed. Pocatello. Accessed at ProQOL Manual | ProQOL