Michelle Black
Elegrow Organisation, Australia
Title: Combatting Compassion Fatigue: The Care Professional’s Resilience Program.
Biography
Biography: Michelle Black
Abstract
The phenomenon of Compassion Fatigue (CF) also known as Secondary Traumatic Stress (STS), is presented from the empirical research relating to CF among Care Professionals. The research uncovered, the symptoms, prevalence, risk factors and best practice interventions identified to alleviate individual experiences and symptoms of CF. Populations explored include; nursing, counselling, social work, hospice care, residential care, mental health and military health care professionals. The research and best practice interventions, informed the development of a combined intervention program to risk manage and alleviate experiences of CF among care professional’s. An inderpendent pilot study of the program facilitated using the Eagala Model found through an analysis of the variance between the pre and post tests, found ProQOL scores for Compassion Fatigue and Burnout decreased whilst Compassion Satisfaction scores increased in addition to statistically significant improvement in overall emotional intelligence (p>0.05) and statistically significant improvements (p>0.05) in the emotional intelligence factors of emotion self-management, emotional expression, emotion self-control and emotion awareness of others. Understanding the increasing demands, high staff turnover and limited capacity to release care professionals from their workplace for professional development, the program is presented in a new interactive, mobile, on-line learning program with support resources. The program in the new mobile on-line mode increases opportunities for care professionals and their organisations to risk manage and combat compassion fatigue.