Compassion Fatigue Solutions

This will be my last blog entry until mid January as I will be taking two weeks off for Christmas. I will be heading to Quebec's Laurentian "mountains" to visit with family and friends. I put mountain in quotes as the Laurentians are very old and therefore quite eroded gentle little hills. (Friends from Western Canada, I hear you laugh!) But the Laurentians offer beautiful and serene forests, wonderful cross country skiing and even one half decent downhill slope.

We (my children and husband and I) are all very much looking forward to being somewhere that isn't wired to the tv, internet or voice mail. I have several new board games that I pretend I purchased for the kids but I'm dying to play them (although apparently I get a bit too competitive when I play Clue, I've been told. I am ashamed to admit that last year I got a little excited trying to beat the 6 year olds!)

Apparently there has been a huge spike in the mouse population however, so we may have to devise some clever new strategies to deal with our little friends. I have a rather embarrassing mouse phobia which once found me sitting on the kitchen counter, phoning my father in law for emergency assistance as one mouse had gotten into the huge bag of dog food and was bouncing around like mad in there...I guess I have something to work on in 2008! (that and learning how to drive standard and how to windsurf and play hockey in a women's league but that's for another day)

What I would like to share with you today before I sign off to go eat and drink and play Risk is a very exciting new venture that I am embarking on.

But first, an update you on WHP's work stuff

The Walking the Walk workbook is almost done. I received one permission to reprint a testing scale that I absolutely needed and so I can now forge ahead in January and finalise my 'camera-ready' text.

I am looking forward to visiting several different cities in January-March, including Winnipeg, Manitoba (last year the temperature in February dipped to -41.7 celsius one day!), Hamilton, Toronto and Montreal. I will be working with agencies such as: a school board, an acquired brain injury clinic, Children's Aid, Military hospital staff, helpers working with high risk infants and youth, a large group of hospital social workers, a burn unit, an oncology ward and possibly a group of staff working with spinal chord injured patients. I am really excited about the opportunity to spend some time with such a varied group of helpers and look forward to learning from them and sharing ideas and strategies.

New Projects - Going deeper with the CF Solutions work

In the New Year, I will be embarking on a new partnership that I would like to describe a little bit here. I greatly enjoy the work I do in the field of CF (in fact, I could easily spend three times as much energy on it every day as my interests far outweigh the time available) and I have been looking for material that goes beyond "day one" of my CF workshops. I have developed several presentations on the topic, but had not yet found some truly excellent organizational resources that addressed the very specialised needs of my helper clientele, until now.

A few months ago, I came across the work of Dr Pat Fisher, CEO of Fisher and Associates. Dr Fisher is a psychologist with a wealth of expertise in the areas of organizational health and wellness. She created an organizational health and wellness company that operates out of Victoria, B.C. and New York and has offered in depth training to staff in the fields of justice and corrections, children's aid and the civil service to name a few.

Dr Fisher and I connected and talked at length about our vision, our values and our programs and came to the conclusion that her work was very complementary to mine. I therefore decided to become an associate of Dr Fisher's which will allow me to retain my independence and also be in the position to offer Fisher and Associate's programs to any of my clients seeking more in depth organizational training and assessment strategies for their agency.

Fisher & Associates offers organizational health and wellness programs using thorough, empirically tested assessment tools that will benefit managers, staff and the organization as a whole. If your agency has already participated in WHP's one day or half day workshops on Compassion Fatigue and self care and wants to look at Stage Two tools for the organization as a whole, there are several different programs being offered by Fisher and Assoc. to meet those needs.

Pat Fisher has developed several workbooks and training courses for health care and human service workers. She co-wrote "When Working Hurts: Stress, burnout and trauma in human, emergency and health services" A workbook designed to accompany the 2 day workshop she offers to agencies; and "The Manager's Guide to Stress, burnout & trauma in human, emergency and health services" which is a companion workbook to a 2 day training program aimed at managers in health services.

If you would like to know more about Fisher, you can visit their website: www.fisherandassociates.org or feel free to email me: whp@cogeco.ca

Here is an excerpt from the company website:

"Fisher and Associates Solutions is an international company based in both Canada and the United States. We are a dedicated team of psychologists, social workers, executive coaches, and mental health professionals specializing in helping organizations, managers, and employees cope with workplace stress and job trauma, including vicarious trauma and compassion fatigue.

We are Organizational Health and Employee Wellness specialists who provide comprehensive, research-based training programs and services. We work with high stress workplaces and occupational groups who are exposed to traumatic stress due to the nature of their work.

Our programs work! Recent follow-up studies with two large organizations that completed our Core Workplace Wellness programs found measurable positive impacts including:

* decreased absenteeism
* improved productivity
* decreased job stress
* better physical and mental health

Wellness programs and educational services offer a significant return on your investment including cost savings in areas such as long and short term disabilities, absenteeism and staff retention! Research tells us that workplace stress and trauma are extremely costly to individuals and organizations. You can lower incidence of workplace stress, burnout and trauma through intervention and education. This can result in increased work performance, higher staff morale, greater employee engagement, less absenteeism and improved overall health of employees. Organizational health and employee wellness are paramount foundations to both high quality work and quality of life"

In the New Year, I will provide more concrete information on the way this training can be offered to your agency, should you be interested to know more about this.

On that note, I would like to wish you all a happy New Year and some time to rest and replenish yourselves.

Françoise

That is the title of a book written by Wayne Muller (1999). It was recently sent to me by Jan Spillman, a colleague based in British Columbia who works with caregivers experiencing compassion fatigue. Here's a quote that struck me:

"Charles is a gifted, thoughtful physician. One day were were discussing the effects of exhaustion on the quality of our work. Physicians are trained to work when they are exhausted, required from the moment they begin medical school to perform when they are sleep-deprived, hurried and overloaded. "I discovered in medical school," Charles told me, "that if I saw a patient when I was tired or overworked, I would order a lot of tests. I could see the symptoms, I could recognize the possible diagnoses, but I couldn't really hear how it all fit together. So I got into the habit of ordering a battery of tests, hoping they would tell me what I was missing. "But when I was rested - if I had an opportunity to get some sleep, or go for a quiet walk - when I saw the next patient, I could rely on my intuition and experience to give me a pretty accurate reading of what was happening. If there was any uncertainty about my diagnosis, I would order a single, specific test to confirm or deny it. But when I could take the time to listen and be present with them and their illness, I was almost always right." (p5-6)

I really resonated with this quote, as I know for a fact that I have been more directive with clients when I have felt overwhelmed with other work requirements (a full waiting room on a Friday afternoon for example vs an empty one on a slow day). That is not something I am proud of, but I can look back with compassion now and realise that I was not rested enough to be able to problem solve with creativity.

Wayne Muller's book adopts a multifaith perspective and encourages the reader to re-explore the concept of taking time out of our weekly schedule for rest and renewal.

I had to take a week off from my weekly posts as there was a death in my family (my aunt, who had been ill with cancer for the past two years). Although we knew she was ill, her death came more quickly than expected. I therefore had to do some last minute fancy footwork to get back to Montreal for the funeral and I am very glad I did. Connecting with loved ones is definitely a wonderful way to replenish ourselves when we are facing difficult life events. I enjoyed seeing relatives that I had not seen in many years.

Then, work-wise, I had the pleasure of presenting to a team from a Montreal hospital and got to offer the workshops in Frenglish as the staff was bilingual and made up of some English speakers and some French speakers. To be honest, Frenglish is my preferred language of choice in spite of years of hard work on my mother's part to instill a clear discipline in sticking to one language at a time! I may have to go to French boot camp and then to English reform school to get the bad habits out of my system. But it was so much fun...

These are all asides, what I wish to tell you about relates to a book I was recently sent by a colleague. I'll write about that now in my official Sunday post for this week.