Compassion Fatigue Related to Oncology Nursing Research Paper

Compassion Fatigue Related to Oncology Nursing - Research Paper Example The state of the patients affects the nurses directly by making them have mood swings. This happens due to the fact that the nurses tend to empathize humanly with the patients and lose focus on mainstreaming and creating a barrier not to affect their emotions. This condition that arises due to care given to the patients is referred to as compassion fatigue. There are other conditions that arises due to provision of care like burnout, these can be successfully be distinguished from compassion fatigue. The entire nursing profession is faced with rapid exponential increase in case of compassion fatigue due to increased number of population that demands health care and the limited number of the nurses to provide the care. This paper analyzes compassion fatigue and other related concepts. Oncology is the study of the causes, development and the occurrence of cancers coupled with treatments and mitigation of the cancerous cells. Cancer is one of the most devastating medical conditions in the contemporary world and the prevalence and incidence of cancer has been on the rife for the last couple of years (Bissett 56). In 1995, another person Figley proposed another definition of what compassion fatigue implies, he advanced that the definition of compassion fatigue is ‘the cost of caring’ (FIgley 154). ... Benign cancers are those which are restricted to one part of the body and do not spread to other types of the body. These types of cancers are easy to treat and can be mitigated easily. On the other hand, the malignant cancers are the most lethal and have the tendency of spreading to other parts of the body. This is the lethal types of cancer which poses the greatest danger to the human life (Henke, Barrie, and Thomas 111). The aim of this paper then is to relate the fate of the nurses who are care providers of these patients and are at the risk of developing emotional breakdown which may impact negatively on their lives, otherwise known as compassion fatigue. The sense of compassion fatigue is then dissected in relation to the position of the nurses in light of their duties. Definition of compassionate fatigue The term compassionate fatigue first came into the public limelight in 1992 when Joinson in a nursing article that he published. In the article Joinson described compassion fa tigue as the condition in which nurses experience a change in their feeling and instead developed a sense of helplessness and emotional changes as a result of witnessing their patient going through a series of devastating conditions of illness and trauma (Bissett 194). In 1995, another person Figley proposed another definition of what compassion fatigue implies, he advanced that the definition of compassion fatigue is ‘the cost of caring’ (FIgley 154). It is therefore imperative that the concept of compassionate fatigue be conceived well in its context by the nurses so that they may not lose focus on their roles as professional nurses at a time that patients are in dire need of their services.