Veterinary Wellness Bien-être vétérinaire:Moving from compassion fatigue to compassion resilience Part 2: Understanding compassion fatigue

摘要

The provision of companion animal veterinary care is a highly specialized field of care that offers immense joys and rewards — improving the health of animals, supporting the well-being of clients, and ultimately, preserving the human-animal bond. Caring for patients and clients can be tremendously satisfying, offering a sense of meaning, purpose, and difference-making incomparable to that which may be found in any other field, yet it can incur a cost, "the cost of caring," (1) commonly known as compassion fatigue. Within the high care professions where empathy, compassion, and caring for others are at the core of practice, compassion fatigue is recognized as an occupational hazard (2). Almost everyone who cares for others in the high care professions will eventually experience some degree of compassion fatigue (3). As Remen (4) so aptly worded it, "The expectation that we can be immersed in suffering... and not be touched by it is as unrealistic as expecting to be able to walk through water without getting wet."