Just Stating: Compassion

COMPASSION

According to Google, Compassion <com·pas·sion> </kəmˈpaSHən/> is a noun which means a sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others: "the victims should be treated with compassion". Some words Synonym to it is pity – mercy - sympathy- commiseration – ruth- clemency.

Compassion is a big word to fill. It is hard, especially when you work in a health care field where you cater with “hopeless” patients. “Hopeless” because they are sick and needed a human being to let them feel that everything will be okay. For a Nurse, when you are busy and having six patient in a twelve hour shift, it is physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually challenging. Sometimes you can be less compassionate with your care when you think of the loads that you need to do during the day.

Nowadays, people cannot blame nurses for having less compassion or none at all due to the some of these reasons:

Too heavy workload – having 5-6 patients in a twelve hour shift is the hardest. You need to prioritize who among them needs the care most, but on the other hand you need to provide equal care to all of them.

Task based nursing- nurses needs to finish their expected task before the end of the shift. Expected task like bathing the patient, giving medications, sitting them up on the chair, turning them, doing dressing change, reporting to the incoming shift, responding to call bells, and many more.

Difficult family – We cannot help it, we deal with difficult families, who even though our team did your best to cater to their needs, they still wanted more. It can be time consuming and challenging for nurses. Then, it ends up having other patients getting less time with their care.

Forms, Papers, Forms, Papers... – Policy makers wants to continuously improve health care. That is good... but, in turn, they provide more paper works for nurses to fill out. Some forms can be dragging and leave them 5 minutes just to fill out.

Charting – they said “if it is not written, it means it is not done”, so that means, nurses needs to write everything that they did for the patients. And writing legibly takes time.

Complex patients with complex needs

Break time – nurses are also human beings working. They also need to eat and drink so that they can function at their best.

Help – “no man is an island” as the saying goes. That means nurses needs to work with their team mates to become more productive. Asking for help to do certain things that one person cannot do is one of them. And sometimes it takes time to look for someone to help you (because everyone is busy), or sometimes they will help you in a hurried manner (because they are busy).

Providing compassion makes patients heal faster. It makes families understand what is going on with their loved ones. It makes bad memories turn into good. It makes a “hopeless” human being feel that there is hope, and somebody cares for them. I hope policy makers and the people who are working in the health care field animate the goals or care which is "to provide compassionate care."

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” - Mahatma Gandhi