Compassion Fatigue Solutions

Last week, both my children came down with the flu (likely the most popular strain currently deluging the media). So my husband and I juggled: we shared the home care for the week (I was co-teaching a three day Crisis intervention course) and washed our hands like mad and tried to resist giving hugs and kisses to them (now, that was hard). They are back in school and seem to be on the mend and we are trying to catch up on missed deadlines and the lot.

It was nothing very serious, but it reminded me of the incredible stress of having younger children and getting the dreaded call from the daycare, which normally meant that not only Poopsie was sick today, but he/she was going to be banned from daycare for the following day, until they were deemed to have been fever-free for a full 24 hours. As soon as I would see the daycare number on call display, my mind would start racing, thinking about coverage for the following day, what was I going to do with the suicidal client I had just safety contracted with (the deal being that they would come back to see me on the next day), who would see the couple who had travelled 2 hours to come for a session who were already on their way to the office, and where would I fit in all the people who had been moved to the following day. Of course, it always worked out, somehow, but the stress involved was significant. And I'm talking about minor ailments here, not the catastrophic illnesses that so many people cope with.

Working as a front line worker has many rewards but the challenging reality is that you have to be "on" when you're at work. You were up all night with a sick family member? Too bad, you have to be 100% focused right now. There are no half measures really. Of course, there are many ways to help each other out - family and friends can step in, if they live nearby, but the stress of the unkwown never really goes away when you are a front line health care worker.

Of course, with the flu outbreak this week, hospital and public health workers are facing a mounting workload and having to deal with many stressors all at once - the hours-long lineups for vaccination speak for themselves, as do the crowded flu clinics.

This morning, I heard a very topical radio interview on CBC's The Current on the impact of the pandemic on health care workers. On the show was Dr Robert Maunder, a psychiatrist at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto who is part of a team who have developed The Pandemic Influenza Stress Vaccine, an online course for health care workers to help us develop resiliency skills while facing the pandemic. He said that several studies found that health care workers who were in the thick of things during the SARS epidemic were found to have lasting psychological effects from working in the SARS environment (more fearful of contamination for long periods of time following the end of the SARS outbreak).

Let me quote from their press release: "A computerized course for health-care workers worldwide to build their resilience during a pandemic. Based on the SARS outbreak in 2003, Mount Sinai experts understand that the spike in health-care workers' stress-related absenteeism results from fear of contagion, concern for family health, job stress, interpersonal, isolation, and perceived stigma. That's why Mount Sinai researchers Dr. Robert Maunder and Dr. William Lancee led a pilot study of computerized training for 150 Mount Sinai health-care workers in 2009. The results suggest that the training improves health-care workers' belief that they can handle the changes a pandemic brings, confidence in support and training, and interpersonal problems. This also suggests that the training may be able reduce stress-related absenteeism. From these findings, the researchers are launching The Pandemic Influenza Stress Vaccine course, which will be an education tool and also the basis of pandemic resilience research.

The course is available over the Internet making it widely accessible at no cost for the health-care workers. The goal is to reach 3,000 health-care workers worldwide.

The course is now live. It is part of a randomized control trial. Hospital-based health-care workers can register at
www.msh-healthyminds.com/stressvaccine. The pilot study was funded by Canadian Institutes for Health Research."

I have not yet had time to go take a look at the course, but Dr Maunder suggests that if you are a health care worker facing the onslaught right now, it may be very worth your while to take a few minutes out of your day to take the course now, rather than wait until you are not in the eye of the storm.