How can compassion protect us against stress and burnout in the nursing profession? We hear many stories of good and bad nursing that demonstrates the importance of compassion. It is also improtant in protecting the people that we care for as well as our colleagues, environment and families. Fundamentally compassion provides the opportunity for us to communicate with each other to find infromation that we might need and to use it to help ourselves and others. The formula for compassion is therefore – Knowledge + Empathy +Sympathy. =Compassion. I have taken this formula from the work of Martha Nussbaum a renowned philosopher of law and ethics who studied human behaviuor for many years. Most importantly wherever these three areas are weak we could become prone to compassion fatigue if for example we don’t know how to help someone( knowledge) or we do not understand thier needs (empathy) or we cannot connect with them emotionally (sympathy). In my own work on service user involvement in mental health nursing I have found that these three areas of compassion translate into both professional and individual areas of peoples lives.
Knowledge includes a sharing of our expertise both professional and personal so that we actually discover together shared goals and values. For individuals this translate to simply – See Me. For professionals it translates into a universal approach to care planning and assessment that recognises and respects boths fields of knowledge.
Empathy means in general terms, trying to understand another person’s experience so that we can help them to find solutions to their problems. For individuals I have translated this to Hear Me. From a professional perspective it is about making sure we understand the diverse and different needs each person brings to the encounter.
Sympathy is more than just understanding what people need but also about understanding how they feel about their experiences. Not everyone is aware of their feelings and this requires a geat deal of sensitivity and respect for others as human beings. For individual people I have translated this into Feel Me. Understanding what it feels like to experience ill health may be quite different from what the research and theory tell us. Understanding about how people feel can be a way of offering hope and recovery towards a more independent future.
If we can make these three components of compassion more visible in our practice and practice them in our everyday relationships, we can begin to measure our own levels of compassion for ourselves and for other people. Self compassion will become one of the best ways to protect ourselves and the people we care about in the turbulent future of healthcare.
