Compassion fatigue is common in caring professions – from GPs to unpaid carers.
Supporting and understanding each other through difficult times is vital, writes Adam Birch, Carers WA Manager Counselling Team.
One of the greatest challenges we face working in a caring profession is what we do with the build-up of emotional fatigue engendered by exposure to other peoples’ emotional pain and suffering.
How does one handle the compassion fatigue as we see client after client? Some say that’s what we are remunerated for, others encourage the need for regular breaks and attending to a healthy lifestyle.
Some professions, like mine, can have clinical standards for supervision to ensure that, at minimum, someone else is checking in.
While compassion fatigue is not a new concept, legislation around psychosocial hazards at work is now applicable. It indicates responsibilities in the workplace around psychological stressors and management of exposure to hazards that can have an impact on our health acutely and chronically.
RELATED: How doctors can maintain good mental health
As a counsellor and manager, I’m encouraged by the focus on stressors impacting health outcomes. What we see here is a shift and acknowledgment away from behaviours that glorify overwork and acknowledge the often unseen and unheard impact of what we do.
Regardless of remuneration or field of work, caring for people takes a toll.
Keeping in mind this toll, when is your next break? Is it after your next run of patients? Your lunch break? Maybe you skip that because there is another patient to see.
Finally, the end of the day, you hope you were able to help. You wrote that mental health treatment plan, a patient thanked you, another walked out forlornly after difficult news. You finally get to breathe at day’s end.
Unpaid carers
Some who provide care don’t always get that. There are some in the community who take on challenges of this profession, without the protections of legislation and remuneration.
It’s the plight of the unpaid carer. I would guarantee that you have met an unpaid carer. Maybe you are one, additional to your professional role.
Statistically that’s likely. After your shift at work, there is someone waiting for you when you are ‘off-the-clock’, yet not really. A child with disability, or a loved one with a chronic physical or mental illness, or an elderly parent?
With over 3.04 million carers across Australia (roughly 12% of the population nationally), over 320,000 in WA, and estimations at an hourly rate of $36.12 per hour equating to roughly $77.9 billion nationally to replace that unpaid care, it is not insignificant.
What’s an unpaid carer to do? For the love of their loved one, they must care day in, day out, due to lack of services, finances or various other reasons, putting their own health at risk.
Perhaps you’ve seen them, informing them they have carer burnout, and advised them to seek supports or to focus on themselves. How many take the advice? Or do they come back with high blood pressure, disrupted sleep, erratic eating, anxiety and depression?
Compassion fatigue among GPs
What about you? Do you take five when a patient receives unwelcome news, and you feel the heartache with them? What if you’re fully booked and people are still waiting?
RELATED: Mental burnout causing health practitioners to quit
After nearly eight years watching the carer community, we ourselves can be notorious for wanting to do more and not taking the time to look after ourselves.
When demands, appointments and waitlists expand, it can feel like there is no space to stop and think about our own wellbeing. That’s what it’s like for unpaid carers.
There are two main reasons I wanted to write this. First, it’s for every unpaid carer out there who has spoken about a challenging experience with a GP or other health professional.
Second, for every GP and other health professional who has found themselves in front of a challenging unpaid carer.
One thing that we could do for you, as a potentially fatigued health professional, or for unpaid carers, is to be mindful of relentless expectations that we should somehow be perfect or always have the answer.
Perhaps rather than a statement of expectation, we could offer a reflection and acknowledgement of how hard it is, and how valuable what we are doing is.
This guest column is CPD verified. Complete your self-reflection and claim your CPD time here.
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