The Compassion Project: Creating and Piloting an Intervention to Protect Healthcare Staff Against Empathy-Based Stress and Enhance Compassionate Care on Mental Health Wards for Children and Adolescents

Le résumé fourni par la source

This pre-registration relates to the analysis plan of the pilot study of The Compassion Project, an intervention which aims to reduce healthcare staff empathy-based stress and enhance compassionate care for patients. Empathy-based stress is an umbrella term relating to empathy fatigue, secondary trauma and burnout. Empathy fatigue (also known as 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. Empathy-based stress is a problem for healthcare staff and their patients. Staff experiencing empathy-based stress deliver less compassionate care, which can lead to serious consequences for patients. Compassion is the recognition that someone is suffering and the desire to help them, which is critical for high quality patient care. Empathy-based stress is also associated with staff sickness, which is bad for staff and costly to the 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. We have already reviewed research on empathy-based stress and interventions to prevent and/or reduce it in mental health ward staff. We have talked to CAMHS ward staff, managers, commissioners, patients and families about this evidence and co-designed an The Compassion Project for ward staff, to reduce empathy-based stress. This pilot study has aimed to test and improve The Compassion Project 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 and managers external to those wards were offered a multi-level intervention including psychoeducation about empathy based stress and ways of combatting it, and information about organisational factors which impact it and ways to address these. In addition staff and managers were given bite-sized resources and compassion champions have nominated themselves to continue with the project. NHS CAMHS ward staff and patients were asked to complete questionnaires and a subsample of staff have been asked to complete interviews about the process of The Compassion Project. This is pre-registration of our analysis of the pilot data, which aims to assess feasibility, acceptability and perceived usefulness of the intervention, and explore potential analytic models for future efficacy trials.

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