What is Compassion Resilience?
Resilience in the health care field is a relatively recent area of investigation which provides a way of understanding what enables health care providers to persist in the face of challenges and offers a complementary perspective to studies of stress, burnout and attrition. Resilience is the ability to recover and continue on in the face of adversity without being overwhelmed or acting in dysfunctional ways. Compassion is the combination of the consciousness of others’ distress and a desire to alleviate it, and is a basic quality needed to be able to meet clients’ needs. Compassion resilience, then, is “the ability to maintain our physical, emotional, and mental well-being while responding compassionately to people who are suffering.”² For those in the health care field, this may be understood as:
- The ability to maintain our physical, emotional and mental well-being
(using energy productively) while compassionately caring for those who are suffering, - Identifying and addressing the barriers to caregivers/families and colleagues being able to effectively partner on behalf of clients, and
- Identifying, preventing, and minimizing compassion fatigue within ourselves.
Think of this resilience as a reservoir of well-being that we can draw upon on difficult days and in difficult situations. It is a dynamic process or outcome that is the result of interaction over time between a person and their environment. Resilience enables health care providers to have longer, more satisfying careers, and has been shown to increase quality of care while reducing errors, burnout and attrition.
Resources to help foster Compassion Resilience:
- Compassion Resilience Toolkit for Schools, Human Services, or Parents and Caregivers - https://compassionresiliencetoolkit.org/
- Provider Resilience App - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/...silience/id559806962
- Professional Quality of Life Measure - https://proqol.org/
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