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.
Highlights
Compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma are understood to be potential outcomes of working in environments where the primary task of the helping professional is to empathise with those experiencing, or having had experienced, trauma
We know the helping professions are more broadly affected in the everyday by their clinical experiences (Espeland 2006; Killian 2008; Strom-Gottfried and Mowbray 2006; Kapoulitsas and Corcoran 2015), and in the health sector we know there is a link between stress, burnout and workplace safety culture (Patterson et al 2010)
The physical and emotional symptoms of both compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma are well documented (Figley 1995; Maslach and Leiter 1997; Dane and Chachkes 2001; Espeland 2006), and the literature validates the phenomenon as being a typical response to working with traumatised peoples (Dane and Chachkes 2001), compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma are seen within the profession and the literature as being an inevitable side effect of the job
Summary
Compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma are understood to be potential outcomes of working in environments where the primary task of the helping professional is to empathise with those experiencing, or having had experienced, trauma. Sci. 2019, 8, 313 is documented as being responsive to increasingly complex and chronic hospital presentations (Craig 2007; Cleak and Turczynski 2014); more broadly in social work practice as balancing potential risk and individual liberty, with the attribution of professional responsibility and, personal and professional blame (Green 2007); and as existing in an emotionally charged practice environment complete with emotions, such as fear and shame, being keenly felt by practitioners yet minimally expressed or discussed (Smith et al 2003) In this environment of ever-increasing demands and complexities, we know that compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma does not affect all social workers in the same way, and there is the possibility of post-traumatic growth (Tedeschi and Calhoun 1996; Radey and Figley 2007) and job satisfaction in this work (Hyatt-Burkhart 2014). The challenge for social work practitioners is in the act and art of researching their own practice, the complex presentations that they interact with, and in the writing of personal narratives through which broader professional learning can be gleaned
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