Compassion Fatigue and Vicarious Trauma in Everyday Hospital Social Work: A Personal Narrative of Practitioner–Researcher Identity Transition

Abstract

The story of my evolution as a practice-based collaborative researcher is a story that comes full circle. Through exploring my own experiences of compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma as a hospital-based social worker, I am able to investigate the phenomenon across the profession and provide a critique of the needs of practitioners working in the complex environment of hospitals and health care. Parallel to this is an investigation into the need for practice research in this complex environment and in the profession overall as seen through the lens of a collaborative research partnership with social work hospital colleagues that transformed my approach to research. I have drawn on personal narrative, autoethnography and reflexive processing to investigate my own impact on and from this research. I conclude with an understanding of the power of storytelling in participatory action research and in the potential in collaborative research methodologies for authentic reciprocity and relationship to traverse the practice–research divide.

Following Fatigue, Feeling Fatigue: A Reflexive Ethnography of Emotion

“…The term 'compassion fatigue,' frequently used in the context of health care and social work, describes the emotions experienced and the eventual emotional flattening which practitioners, who repeatedly hear and witness others' trauma in their work, may experience (Fox, 2019). The repetition of trauma in their work can erode practitioners' ability to remain compassionate as a result of numbing to others' trauma, such as instances where a general sense of fatigue results in disengagement and cynicism (see Eule, Borrelli, Lindberg, & Wyss, 2019;Wettergren, 2010).…”

Trauma experienced by researchers: challenges and recommendations to support students and junior scholars

“…On the contrary, a board range of disciplines are impacted, and scholars can experience various kinds of research trauma. For example, this occurs in topics pertaining to disciplines such as criminology and sociology (Coles et al, 2014;Nikischer, 2019), political science (Knott, 2019;Loyle and Simoni, 2017), geography (Eriksen, 2017), social work (Fox, 2019), psychology (Hamburger et al, 2018), and a wide range of other fields. Thus, research trauma is something that does not happen to only a few in a specific field or specifically defined topics.…”

“…For example, this occurs in topics pertaining to disciplines such as criminology and sociology (Coles et al. , 2014; Nikischer, 2019), political science (Knott, 2019; Loyle and Simoni, 2017), geography (Eriksen, 2017), social work (Fox, 2019), psychology (Hamburger et al. , 2018), and a wide range of other fields.…”