Compassion Fatigue Solutions

I apologise for the longish silence but I have been busy writing up a report for an agency. I can now return to posting weekly as is my goal.

I invite you to visit the Compassion Fatigue Awareness Project: www.compassionfatigue.org and browse through the resources available. The web site has, in particular, good resources for animal care workers (click on Resources to find links and articles.)

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On Managers and Compassion Fatigue

Supervisors and managers who work in the helping fields end up in a tough spot: Most of the management staff I have met over the years are extremely concerned about the wellbeing of their employees and feel stuck between their staff's needs (for a reduced workload, for policies that allow for more flexibility in the schedule, for concrete actions that recognise the reality of compassion fatigue in the workplace) and the need to ensure that service delivery continues and that client needs are met.

I have lost count of the times I have had a manager, almost in tears, come to me at the end of a workshop and say: "How do we, the managers, juggle it all? How do we care for our staff without burning out ourselves?"

The answer, of course, isn't simple, but there are some strategies that can help. This was my motivation in bringing Dr Pat Fisher to present a two day course for Managers in Kingston in May. I will be carrying out an interview with Pat Fisher in the weeks to come, so come back if you are curious to know more. And if you live near Kingston, do consider enrolling for the course. It will be an extremely valuable two day workshop specifically designed for managers and supervisors.

Now, in terms of what I'm up to today, I'm going to play badminton with kids this afternoon, and then I will likely not be able to resist watching part of the Oscars before falling asleep (those long boring speeches where everyone thanks their lawyer, stylist and publicist, yawn. Why not take this opportunity to advocate for a charitable cause? Maybe one of the winners will do just that tonight and surprise us).

Next week is the Train the Trainer workshop which I am very much looking forward to as it's an opportunity to work for two days with a small group of dedicated helpers from highly varied backgrounds. This time around, there are psychologists, family doctors, nurses, social workers and counsellors from a wide range of agencies such as hospitals, veterans affairs, public health, children's services and other community agencies. If you are interested in this training programme, please note that the June session is already half full.

Hope you have a good week!

This is a quick one as I am about to jump on a train for Brampton, Ontario. I have been asked to go run a series of focus groups for a very forward-thinking large community agency who wish to prepare their managers and supervisors to respond appropriately to staff presenting with concerns surrounding compassion fatigue. I am really looking forward to hearing their thoughts and concerns about this important issue. Then it's Montreal for dinner with my siblings and nieces (always a wonderful treat) and a workshop to the National Parole Board. Then back on the train for a pitstop at home to kiss hubby and kids and change clothes and off to Toronto for a workshop with special needs educational assistants. I will be very happy to sleep in my own bed by the end of the week.

I have had the very rare opportunity to spend part of the weekend completely on my own, sans children and sans partner (they were away visiting relatives) which is very nice but also very odd, for those of you who have had children I'm sure you can relate? So this is what I did with my free time: I went to play badminton with a friend, went for a very long walk around our town, and went to see the movie Slumdog Millionaire last night (very disturbing first part but the rest is very good and worth staying through the difficult stuff, I thought) and then out for wings and beer until the ungodly hour of, gasp 11:30pm. Crazy night out on the town...

I also came across a fun blog for those of you interested in cooking with a crockpot and thereby saving on energy costs and lowering your grocery bills: take a look at www.crockpot365.blogspot.com
Freelance writer Stephanie decided to spend a year cooking with her crockpot and you can find her amusing reflections and recipes on this site.

Ok, off to the races. Wishing you a healthy week.

Photo by Sakurai Midori - Autumn Fruit and Vegetables Japan from wikimedia commons

On the lovely topic of food:

One of my very first memories is watching my Inuit babysitter roll and fry her daily bannock when I was 2 or 3 years old. I can still conjure up the smell and taste of that hot bread now. Fresh deep fried bannock tastes like nothing else you'll ever try, it's just one of those things. You likely have foods like that too from somewhere in your past?

I have always been passionate about food. I'm not sure why, though I recall that when I was young my mother and my aunt used to love planning meals together, poring over recipes and trying new and unusual things. I remember one hilarious day when my mom and I bought one of each of the new tropical fruit that had just arrived in the grocery stores. This was in the early 1980s and we had never seen these strange things before nor did we know how to tell whether they were ripe (they weren't - we ended up feeling like we had fur growing on our tongues and racing for water but laughing our heads off.)

My mother was also always a strong believer in healthy eating and tried to the best of her ability to offer us fresh produce. I am not sure how she managed that during the years that we lived in a place where the ship came only once or twice a year with our groceries but she soldiered on: she made home made yogurt, sprouted beans, granola...

Anyhow, this rather lengthy introduction is to talk about a fascinating radio show I heard on Thursday. If you speak French, you can skip the rest of this post and simply go to www.radio-canada.ca/radio/christiane and look for Christiane Charette's January 29th interview with Dr Richard Béliveau.

Dr Béliveau is a biochemist who works as a research scientist at two Montreal Universities. He is an expert in cancer prevention and is also a gifted communicator who aims to bring his lab findings to our dinner tables.
He has written three books on cancer prevention and nutrition:
Foods to Fight Cancer, Cooking with Foods that Fight Cancer and his most recently released Eating Well, Living Well: Everyday Preventive Medicine which will be available in English in the Fall of 2009. He also writes a weekly column in the Journal de Montréal which you can read online:

Here are some findings:

-Reaching your healthy weight reduces your chance of developing diabetes by 90%
-26% of Canadian children and teens are overweight
-Excess abdominal fat is linked to certain types of cancers (the rates are staggering: 75% of colon cancers are nutrition related).

Dr Béliveau recommends five key strategies to improve your health and reduce the risk of cancer

1) Quit smoking
2) Exercise at least 30 minutes per day
3) Aim to reach and keep your healthy weight
4) Eat a large amount of fruit and vegetables each day
5) Eliminate junk food

Key foods to add to your diet:

-Any vegetable from the cabbage family: broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage...
-Garlic and onions
-Soy products (soybeans, tofu)
-Turmeric (1 tsp per day)
-Green Tea
-Berries
-Omega 3 fatty foods (salmon, walnuts, flax seeds)
-Tomatoes
-Citrus fruit
-1 glass of red wine per day
-Two squares of 70% dark chocolate per day

Of course you know all that already, right? But are you walking the walk?

My children were thrilled when I announced that from now on, desert would have to be chocolate!

with Françoise Mathieu, M.Ed., CCC.
Location: Donald Gordon Conference Centre Kingston, On.

A beautiful location and great food. A nice starting point for a two day intensive retreat to become (or hone your skills as) a compassion fatigue trainer.

Workshop Size
Spaces limited to a maximum of 20 participants.
Certificates of Completion will be provided
Cost (includes lunch and morning and afternoon breaks): $598.00 CND
This fee covers cost of materials including training manuals and handout templates.

Workshop Description
Some past participants of our one day Compassion Fatigue workshop (Walking the Walk) expressed an interest in receiving help in designing a workshop to bring back to their communities and developing skills and knowledge base to deliver compassion fatigue workshops themselves. This train the trainer workshop offers tools, handouts, strategies, training material and marketing strategies to adapt Walking the Walk to your community's specific needs (and to your own presentation style). You do not need to have attended WtheW in the past to benefit from this training.

Because of the small size of the group, we will customize certain aspects of the training to your specific needs. A questionnaire will be sent ahead of time to establish your needs/goals and objectives and aim to fulfill as many of these as possible.

Day one will be experiential (you will participate in a one day CF workshop) and Day two will discuss tools, strategies and techniques to develop and deliver the workshops on your own and become a CF educator and trainer.

What differentiates this workshop from other educational sessions out there is the extra layer of understanding and validation that we hope to convey to our workshop participants. Therefore, the train the trainer workshop is designed to take you deep first, to gain a true and thorough understanding of your own relationship to CF. Then we go into the didactic details (what to teach, how to teach) and finally talk about the mechanics of the whole process (how to customize this for your own work needs/goals etc.). More info: www.compassionfatigue.ca

Photo of Rideau Canal in Ottawa, Canada, from commons.wikimedia.org

Here is what has been going on this week in Kingston Ontario.

If you live in my part of the world, you too will have been enjoying the deep freeze that we have been experiencing during the past week or so. I run outside throughout the the winter and spent the first part of my childhood in the arctic so I am not too fazed by cold weather but when my eyelashes freeze together, I tend to draw the line at outdoor pursuits. I did make one exception to this on Sunday as I was in Ottawa and had the opportunity to skate, for the very first time, on the Rideau Canal which is considered to be the longest natural frozen ice rink in the world, or the second if you are from Winnipeg, who claim to have the world's longest natural frozen ice rink in the world!

Skating on the Rideau was fantastic, and had it not been minus 25 celsius and had I been sans kids, I would have loved to skate the full length of it. I don't know why exactly, but skating outside makes me feel blissfully happy and at peace.

Do you have an activity like that?

I am currently working on the Compassion Fatigue Workbook which is a distillation of my one day compassion fatigue workshop but is designed to be used as a solo or group tool. I have several ongoing projects right now to develop more distance learning materials which are far more affordable than travelling to attend a workshop or bringing a speaker to your community. Let me know if you have any special requests or ideas. Stay warm.

I am very pleased to announce that after many months of work and a very helpful computer programmer, my bookstore is finally ready. Now, this is a very soft launch as there are only two products in the bookstore at the moment (an ebooklet and a Train the Trainer workbook) but it will grow over the coming months. The goal of this bookstore is to create a web-based resource centre for helpers seeking distance learning resources and workbooks to assist them as individuals and/or as trainers.

Go take a look: www.cfsolutionsbookstore.com

Currently available:

Ebook: Designing and marketing a compassion fatigue workshop in 10 key steps

Contains:
• Self assessment exercises to help you evaluate where you are starting from.
• Strategies to identify and develop your very own workshop style
• Key books and resources in the field
• Marketing and promotion: lessons learned and things you should know and many more tips, ideas and strategies.


Compassion Fatigue Train the Trainer - Workbook

This manual offers tools to help you design your own CF workshops and assist you to become a compassion fatigue trainer. The material included in this manual is based on WHP’s one day workshop Walking the Walk: Creative Tools for Transforming Compassion Fatigue which has been offered across Canada since 2001.

Enclosed in this manual you will find:

• A description of the 17 Educational and experiential goals of the Walking the Walk course.
• A extensive resource list (books, links to websites, articles, etc.)
• An appendix with handouts that can be used for your training sessions.
• A copy of three articles written by WHP: Low Impact Disclosure , Running on
Empty and Transforming compassion fatigue into compassion satisfaction: top 12 self-care tips for helpers.

Yesterday, (January 14th, 2009), the Globe and Mail published the results from the 5th annual survey of "the best small and medium employers in Canada" by Queen's School of Business.

I was very curious to read more on the key elements that made these companies the best, and my hunch was confirmed: Among the top companies, the focus is on empowering employees, rewarding effort and encouraging growth among staff by supporting ongoing training. Flexible work hours are also encouraged and hierarchy discouraged (some of our hospitals a ways to go on some of these points...)

"At top-ranked Protegra [the company who won best employer award], employees are encouraged to participate in goal setting and decision making at monthly staff meetings. [...] At top companies, not only do employees have a say in setting direction, they are also given wide berth to run with their ideas."

I am fascinated by these findings as they are exactly what we recommend to minimise compassion fatigue and enhance wellness among helping professionals. The top strategies for health care organizations wanting to mitigate the impact of compassion fatigue are related to offering flexible work hours, providing staff with positive feedback, supporting continuing education and genuinely inviting staff to contribute to the direction and manner in which the organization is progressing in the future.

So, I'm sure many of you are wondering who came in the top five? Here they are:

Number 1: Protegra Inc., Winnipeg (IT and business consulting)
Number 2: Miele Canada, Ontario (Appliance maker)
Number 3: Gibraltar Solutions Inc., Mississauga (IT and consulting)
Number 4: ISL Engineering and Land Services Inc. Edmonton (Engineering)
Number 5: Hood Group, Edmonton (Engineering, construction and environmental consulting)

More on this at globeandmail.com/smallbusiness

If you are interested in exploring this issue some more, I would highly recommend that you read the book "Maverick" by Ricardo Semler. Semler owns a large successful manufacturing company in Brazil and this book chronicles how he dismantled the entire corporate structure of his company and reaped the rewards tenfold. He also describes how he obtained the help of his staff to weather through a severe recession in Brazil in the early 90s. It's a highly readable book, I would recommend it to any manager interested in exploring this further.