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For health care providers, caring for clients who are suffering can be incredibly rewarding as well as emotionally draining and physically and intellectually demanding. The stress of working in an evolving practice environment with complex technologies, significant time pressures, and regulatory and organizational demands can take its toll on the wellbeing and resilience of health care providers that are so vital to optimal care of clients and career satisfaction. In our efforts to help clients build their physical and emotional health and resilience, we are charged with the examination of our own capacity personally and professionally to model that which we strive to build.
Our capacity to serve our clients and communities are impacted by our personal histories, organizational supports, and the societal context we work in. The toolkit attempts to center trauma and equity informed perspectives that add value in understanding where each individual starts on their path to compassion resilience; this lens also deepens our understanding of what supports can be offered to fuel the energy of a diverse staff that is stretched thin. Simply stated, compassion fatigue and resilience will impact you differently depending on your history, identity, and social position in your organization. The content of this toolkit has been strongly informed by research and best practices related to resilience, equity, positive psychology, compassion fatigue, organizational psychology, trauma, and mindfulness.
The extent to which our organizational culture and systems support these efforts needs to also be examined. An intentional focus on building providers’ resilience is both an individual and organizational responsibility and opportunity. In fact, there is a strong case for provider well-being, including compassion and resilience, being identified as a core value and pillar of health care organizations.
What is known as the “Triple Aim”— enhancing client care, improving population health outcomes, and lowering costs — is widely accepted as a compass to optimize the performance of health care systems. Yet the health care workforce reports widespread burnout and dissatisfaction. This has been associated with lower client care satisfaction, reduced health outcomes, and potentially increased costs. Therefore, it is imperative that a fourth pillar, provider well-being, be added to the current compass. Without promoting the well-being and resilience of health care providers, it becomes increasingly more difficult to make positive impacts in the other three pillars.¹
Resilience in the health care field is a relatively recent area of investigation which provides a way of understanding what enables health care providers to persist in the face of challenges and offers a complementary perspective to studies of stress, burnout and attrition. Resilience is the ability to recover and continue on in the face of adversity. Compassion is the combination of the consciousness of others’ distress and a desire to alleviate it, and is a basic quality needed to be able to meet clients’ needs. Compassion resilience, then, is “the ability to maintain our physical, emotional, and mental well-being while responding compassionately to people who are suffering.”²
Resilience enables health care providers to have longer, more satisfying careers, and has been shown to increase quality of care while reducing errors, burnout and attrition.3,4 This toolkit will explore the protective factors that build and maintain compassion resilience.
