Health Care Professionals

 

Compassionate care

I am a most fervent advocate of working according to the ‘compassionate care’ principle. The term compassionate care derives from American healthcare and really means ‘care from the heart, supported by scientific knowledge’. Compassionate care is built around the philosophy that respectful care is more than just professionally applying medicine and continuously updating your clinical knowledge. A good healthcare professional, and this applies both to human and animal medical care, has to be able to adapt to the emotions of each individual patient (or client-patient combination in animal health) which he or she is caring for. You can tell the same item of news to a patient or the owner of a sick animal one hundred times a day, but each time the reaction will different.

The philosophy seems quite simple and straightforward, but it is still a rarity in current healthcare. In America and also in the Netherlands, several attempts have already been made to integrate this principle into general healthcare. Up until now, all attempts have failed. We constantly hear enthusiastic reports to lectures on this topic, and some healthcare professionals are indeed applying this principle to their work, but there is absolutely no question of this being integrated generally and structurally wordwide. Proponents of this principle wonder time and time again, why it appears to be so difficult to integrate this principle. I think I have found the underlying reason for this problematic integration. Furthermore, this reason also offers a solution at the same time.

This type of healthcare requires the development of communication skills and personal development. Good personal development automatically leads to improved communication. I am convinced that this is the source of the problems. This is, in fact, the ‘sickness’ in healthcare.

Personal Development: Basis for Compassionate Care

The situation in which healthcare professionals find themselves can be termed as deplorable. At this very moment, the burnout rate in the healthcare sector is said to be 40%. It is hard to keep pace with the number of partnerships and other forms of healthcare associations that are disintegrating. Disputes in partnerships make the headlines, because not only is it the patients that suffer, but this phenomenon even costs lives. Veterinaries are at the top of the list when it comes to the number of suicides per annum, closely followed by doctors. It seems that it is the healthcare professionals, who find it hard to cope on a daily basis.

Naturally, large-scale work is being undertaken to find a solution to these problems. Management and marketing courses are mushrooming all over the place. I do think that such courses are indeed helpful; healthcare professionals hardly develop their undertaker skills during education. This results in high workload and sub optimal corporate processes. Healthcare asks a lot: workload is high, expectations of clients are not always realistic for instance because they have difficulty in accepting the diagnosis, time budget demands, target aimed mentality becomes more and more the rule. It is a fact that management and marketing courses help, but ultimately they only deal with the symptoms. The problems are only really addressed when the cause of the ‘illness’ is tackled, when you start from the beginning. I am very focused on healthcare. However, an intelligent reader or listener will gather that the approach which I advocate can also provide solutions outside of healthcare. I am not just thinking about business life in general, but I am also thinking about our present-day life in society in general. I shall come back to this later.

The source of the problems lies in the lack of personal development and the lack of communication skills in our current society. When I look at healthcare, I note the total lack of these aspects in any of the training of health professionals. As a health professional, you can choose to ignore the cry for help from the individuals who come to you as patients and focus solely on the clinical aspect. However, health professionals are confronted with strong emotions on an almost daily basis. That pristine emotional barrier which we all build up around ourselves throughout our lives, will time and time again imperceptibly let through the emotions that we perceive. If the healthcare professional has not learned to deal with this adequately during training, his or her emotional reserve will break down at a given moment. This moment is mistakenly referred to as burnout. A much better term for healthcare professionals would be compassion fatigue; exhaustion of your emotional help resources.

I find the symptoms described painful examples of failing healthcare training. I have graduated with clinically speaking fantastic colleagues, but who could not even look me in the eye when they were talking to me. After graduation, these same fantastic colleagues are then thrown to the lions. They immediately have to face violent, painful emotions, and the whole day long they do nothing else but communicate and assist and counsel constantly sick animals and their grief-stricken owners. Also on a daily basis, these healthcare professionals become involved in bereavement counselling and the emotional owners at the start of the mourning process. These are skills which clearly demand a balance between emotion and understanding; personal development therefore. Structural training in this type of skills is lacking in the majority of current healthcare training courses. Especially the combination of personal development and communication skills development does not get the attention it deserves from day one in the curriculum of the healthcare educations, which means that graduate healthcare professionals are badly equipped to start work.

It is possible to remedy the current situation by improving healthcare training. My vision has already been made quite clear. My mission is to change healthcare training. From day one of the course, communication and personal development have to make up an important learning objective of all healthcare training. I am certain that healthcare provision on the basis of the compassionate care principle will then automatically follow, which will ensure that the patients will receive the care, the respect and the emotional support which they deserve and are entitled to. At the same time, the healthcare professional will find it less difficult to provide total care and respect for the person he or she is caring for, and especially to respect themselves.

I have produced a CD, entitled ‘Compassion’, in order to draw attention to this subject. It is a CD from colleague to colleague, a CD for patient and client. You can listen to a CD time and time again. You can listen to it at a party or in the car. I have chosen easy listening music, suitable for a large section of the population. This CD will constantly remind people of the aim, the vision and the mission. You can read a book and then put it out of mind, whereas a CD can be played over and over again. The CD ‘Compassion’ is the start of a journey that will have to ensure that, with regard to personal development and communication, something really has to change. Healthcare training courses and healthcare professionals already working in the sector will be the first to be approached. The ultimate aim is to inextricably link compassionate care with healthcare and all healthcare professionals.

Target Group

The ‘Compassion’ project is primarily aimed at the healthcare sector. However, the vision and mission can easily be extended to a wider target group; society in general.

I could go into this very deeply, but everyone can read between the lines. Personal development can go wrong at a very early stage. It is therefore very important to integrate personal development into the learning programme at a very early age. It naturally has to be adapted to the age group. We can all shout from the roofs that children should not bully each other, but this is on the increase. Bullying is an expression of uncertainty, loneliness and powerlessness to communicate in any other way. By shouting that it is not allowed is not helpful, but tackling the cause is. Senseless violence, aggression, growing discrimination, increasing loneliness. People are increasingly passing each other by at a faster pace, and are becoming more invisible. There are almost more doctors’ and veterinaries’ surgeries closing down than new ones opening. ‘Communication’ is becoming increasingly tetchy. People are less and less prepared to express their emotions. In the ‘tough’ business world it is almost forbidden; a sign of weakness, which in politics is always worth a caricature. We are chasing targets and we are becoming a shadow of who we really could be. The healthcare sector is now also setting strict targets. Every minute has to be justified. This hardly leaves any time for the individual patient.

We are all in the same boat and we are heading downwards. The solution is obvious. We have to relearn to communicate, to listen and to feel.

In America, there is a project that is discussed in more depth on www.challengeday.org. This project organises and supports days in secondary schools on which the issues of bullying, discrimination, lack of communication and isolation are addressed. I have seen very impressive examples of this. The results of this organisation are therefore highly promising. It tackles the problem at source. It is one of the examples of the innumerable possibilities available to really make an improvement in the field of communication in all walks of life, within companies, and within the healthcare sector.

Support the project

Support the project by:
- Buying a CD, via the website www.compassionatecare.nl (delivered to your home) or at the various sales outlets in Schagen, Northern Holland. Enormous amounts of money have been invested in this project, and by buying a CD you are providing direct support to the project by making a small financial contribution, and at the same time you are expressing your support for the vision, mission and aim of this project. Give support to your colleagues; give support to yourself and to your clients and patients.
- Bying a CD supports KiKa (children without cancer) and the NKFD (Dutch Cancerfoundation for Animals). - You can leave a message on the website forum; share experiences, provide suggestions to achieve the stated objective.

On-Going Campaigns

Experts in the field of communication and personal development are currently working hard to create a full day’s training programme for teams working in the healthcare sector. Initially, these training courses are aimed at complete teams operating within a veterinary surgery. The aim of the training course is to offer a step in the right direction, whereby some self-knowledge and knowledge about the role in the team has to ensure improved communication, thus leading to a more effective team. The first training course will take place in May 2007.

Contact has been made with the curriculum commission of the veterinary faculty and the first discussions will shortly take place.

Paula Hendriks