Nurses and professional caregivers are prone to feeling overly burdened from all of the sad and desperate events they see every day. This has been recognized and even assigned a name “compassion fatigue” (Lanier, 2017).Our population is not only living longer, they are living longer with increased chances of physical and/or mental disability, primarily due to the aging process. This aging process may result in the person needing more assistance with activities of daily living which falls onto the shoulders of their immediate family, often a spouse or adult child. What happens to these families or caregivers? Professionals suffering from caregiving for others have received help and recognition of the problem. This is not the case for non-professionals (Lanier, 2017).
The Family Alliance Caregiving (2017) has called caregiving one of “the most stressful jobs on this earth.” An “emotional roller coaster that never ends” (para 5). Anyone that has experienced this scenario knows that there is little time for oneself. The “job” can be overburdening, overwhelming, and full of unknowns. It is a very scary situation in which family members do not know where and whom to turn to.
In this presentation, we will discuss the scope and the existing problem, and share a caregiver’s stress test that we will use in qualitative research of caregivers in the future. We will discuss some of the strategies noted in the literature to address this problem. We will also share stories of caregivers who have recently experienced this in their own lives and relate how they were able to cope and survive the stress of caregiver burden.
We will then share our caregiver stress test to evaluate the burden. Healthcare staff could use this simple test to evaluate family caregivers, with the idea of then giving them tools to relieve stress. Stress relief methods will be discussed and evaluated. Self-care is very important to physical, emotional, and mental stress relief. Caregivers suffer in silence to the detriment of their ability to experience satisfaction or joy in their lives now and for the future. (Lanier, 2017). This information could be added to the nursing curriculum and shared with healthcare staff to evaluate situations so as to avoid caregiver burnout in future situations.