Burnout vs. Compassion Fatigue
Burnout has become a healthcare industry buzzword lately. You likely will not get out of a current state-of-healthcare conversation without talking about burnout and the current labor workforce. Not enough nurses, temporary contracted employees, and travel nurses filling the shortages. The approach to understanding nurse burnout is paramount to moving forward with a culture of support.
It is not enough to know what burnout is, but to also know how staff burnout happens and the contributing factors that lead to burnout. Unpacking the burnout box can be complex and overwhelming–like cleaning up an emergency room with an alcohol wipe. You need to proceed with a mindset of understanding and creativity. No one asked for a nursing shortage and certainly, no one was equipped to recognize the crippling effect of the pandemic. How did we get here? What can we learn from the situation we are in? Who can help? How can we mitigate the shortage and staffing issues behind us?
First, we must understand the contributing factors. How do we manage the amount of trauma nurses are exposed to and how are we debriefing stressful and complex situations? Without decompression systems and processes in place, compassion fatigue emerges and materializes from stressors that healthcare workers are repeatedly exposed to. The result: decreased empathy toward patients and colleagues, increased sick call-out shifts, patient safety concerns, drug and alcohol abuse, and poor job satisfaction (Wolotira, 2023).
Take compassion fatigue and add exposure to past and present personal trauma, high-stress environments, and long-term exposure to traumatic events and you have a recipe for burnout (Wolotira, 2023). Our sea of healthcare trauma contributing factors consists of chronic short staffing, high patient-to-nurse ratios, unsafe workplace conditions, violence towards healthcare workers, and lack of control and autonomy…the list is endless.
Where do we go from here?
Couple compassion fatigue with high-stress environments, long-term trauma exposure, and past personal trauma, and burnout is born. Burnout is difficult to reverse. It impacts resiliency and leads to decreased productivity, feelings of helplessness, decreased patient safety, and poor self-efficacy of the healthcare worker.
The trauma room is not anyone’s fault. It happens. Look at the situation with a plan of how to process, how to clean it up, how to move forward with clean-up supplies, and the skills necessary to feel empowered to “reset the room” or unpack the situation by debriefing with your team, colleague, or supervisor. Creating space to learn from situations and shared experiences with a standardized approach, such as:
What went well?
What was lacking or substandard?
How could we have done better?
What resources did we use or did not use to manage the situation?
High stress situations like a critical patient, unhappy family member of a patient, or dissatisfied customer can be threatening and cause us to shut down, become defensive, or lash back. These and similar situations can accumulate. Without a proper “reset”, trauma can develop and build eventually lead to workplace compassion fatigue and burnout.
We need to reset ourselves each day to be there for our families, our patients, and our colleagues. Let’s create space and mobilize resources to help our nurses and workforce process, plan a path forward, build resiliency skills, and empower each other to create a culture of support. Reach out and to learn more about how to create a culture of support and workforce resiliency.
References
Wolotira EA. Trauma, Compassion Fatigue, and Burnout in Nurses: The Nurse Leader's Response. Nurse Lead. 2023 Apr;21(2):202-206. doi: 10.1016/j.mnl.2022.04.009. Epub 2022 May 13. PMID: 35582625; PMCID: PMC9098943.
