Farmscape for October 4, 2016

A health promotion and communications researcher suggests failure to address burnout and compassion fatigue in veterinary medicine can result in the profession losing qualified caregivers.
"Burnout and Compassion Fatigue in Veterinary Medicine" was among the topics discussed last week as part of the "International One Welfare Conference" in Winnipeg,
Brenda Lovell, an independent researcher in the area of health promotion and communications, says her research has shown the greatest potential contributors to burnout are work life conflict, emotional demands and business management and, when emotional demands become intense and constant, compassion fatigue can set in.

Clip-Brenda Lovell-Independent Researcher:
Burnout has three components.
It has an emotional exhaustion component, it has a depersonalization and a personal accomplishment component.
Compassion fatigue is more related to the emotional side of the burnout dimension.
It occurs where you have continued and excessive exposure to traumatic events and emotions that patients and clients and their families experience.
If you do have this burnout and compassion fatigue, for one thing, your practice will suffer.
You won't feel empathy, you won't be able to communicate with your patents well, you'll have physical and mental health repercussions such as headache, you'll feel very fatigued physically.
Those kinds of things will be quite visible in your practice and people will be able to see those.
Those will be the major things that would take place.
You won't be able to make the best decisions, so your decision making capability is compromised and again any time those all fester together it has a bad outcome on your practice or your particular work you're dong.

Lovell suggests organizations need to provide supports, to assist caregivers in managing the work life balance and stress, self care strategies can be effective and peer support can play a role in preventing burnout and compassion fatigue.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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