Compassion Project: Developing an Empathy-Based Stress Intervention

Summary

Compassion is recognising that someone is suffering and wanting to help them. Compassion fatigue is a reduction in capacity to feel compassion for others. Secondary trauma is the experience of traumatic responses to hearing about someone else's trauma. Burnout is depersonalisation, emotional exhaustion, and feeling less good at one's job. Compassion fatigue, secondary trauma and burnout can all be referred to as empathy-based stress. This is a problem for healthcare staff and their patients.

Staff experiencing empathy-based stress deliver less high quality care, which can lead to serious consequences for patients. Empathy-based stress is also associated with staff sickness, which is bad for staff and costly to the United Kingdom's National Health Service (NHS).

Child and adolescent mental health (CAMHS) wards are busy, high-pressure environments where families and young people are often upset, resources are stretched, and staff are managing high levels of patient risk of self-harm or suicide.

The principal investigator has already reviewed research on empathy-based stress and interventions to prevent and/or reduce it in mental health ward staff. This evidence has been presented to CAMHS ward staff, managers, commissioners, patients and families and these stakeholders have co-designed an intervention for wards, to reduce empathy-based stress. The intervention aims to help staff to feel better and care better.

This pilot study aims to test and improve our intervention on two CAMHS wards, measuring how useful and well-liked it is, and how feasible it would be to use it and to test it on more wards. Staff on CAMHS wards will be offered a modular intervention including psychoeducation about empathy based stress and ways of combatting it, and workplace stressor and management toolkits. NHS CAMHS ward staff and patients will be asked to complete questionnaires and a subsample of staff will be asked to complete interviews about the process of the intervention.

Conditions

• Reduction of Empathy-Based Stress in Healthcare Staff

Interventions

OTHER

The Compassion Project: Intervention to Reduce Empathy-Based Stress in Staff

Six month package of training and resources delivered to ward staff, including bite-sized audio, video and written materials. Face to face training will be provided weekly by a clinical psychologist. A staff group of 'compassion champions' will be responsible for embedding the intervention.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• National Institute for Health Research, United Kingdom

  collaborator OTHER_GOV

• Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust

  collaborator OTHER_GOV

• Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust

  collaborator OTHER

• University of Bath

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Lucy Maddox, DClinPsy · University of Bath

Study Design

Allocation

NON_RANDOMIZED

Purpose

TREATMENT

Masking

NONE

Model

SEQUENTIAL

Eligibility

Min Age

13 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2024-08-01

Primary Completion

2026-08-01

Completion

2027-08-31