The epidemic of compassion fatigue

Abstract

Compassion and empathy are essential to the foundation of medical provision. Compassion is listed in ‘Good medical practice: a code of conduct for doctors in Australia’ as a quality required to build trust with patients and enable the development of doctor–patient relationships. Listening to the ‘Pomegranate Series Podcast, episode 38: making a connection’, led me to reflect on the importance of compassion and empathy in medical practice. A recent personal experience as a family member of a loved one at the end of their life made me realise the utmost importance of medical professionals showing compassion. I noticed that simple things can make the world of difference to individuals – acknowledging someone’s sadness or distress, or offering a family member a chair or a tissue. Recently when my grandad was dying, it seemed doctors would avoid my family’s sadness. It disappoints me that as medical professionals we are missing opportunities to show our compassion. Surely we all went into medicine to ‘help’ people, and compassion is one of the simplest and most effective ways of doing this. In my personal and professional experience, simple acts of kindness are being neglected. Have we become ‘too busy’ to show kindness, or has medical school conditioned us to see only pathology and physiology rather than emotion? I do not believe the lack of compassion I have witnessed in clinical practice is due to individuals but a reflection of an exhausted workforce plagued by compassion fatigue. While witnessing medical professionals’ avoidance of emotional suffering, I considered why this has become the norm. Are we using avoidance as a defence to protect ourselves from our own emotions? Research has shown that identifying a person’s emotion is more likely to be helpful than detrimental to the doctor–patient relationship. There are no clear data that quantify how widespread the phenomenon of compassion fatigue is, but clinical experience suggests we have an epidemic on our hands. Literature demonstrates that compassion fatigue can result in a pervasive negative attitude that affects patient care and professional well-being. To avoid a recurrence of events such as those that occurred in Mid-Staffordshire in the UK, where inadequate care (driven by poor staffing and low morale) led to innumerable avoidable deaths, we need to reignite our Letters to the Editor