Case Study: Compassion Fatigue

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A. Saint Mary’s hospital assessed the need for training on an organizational, person, and tasks level by identifying problems in the workplace. On an organizational level, Saint Mary’s determined that there was a need for training based on the “high turnover” which reflects low job satisfaction by the employees. The company also assessed a need for training based on the “poor patient satisfaction” which indicates a high employee error rate and a poor performance by the organization. Furthermore, Saint Mary’s assessed a need for training on a person level based on the “compassion fatigue” and “sadness [and] despair” that individual nurses experienced. Finally, the hospital assessed a need for training on a task level by identifying that the nurses “failed to deliver quality care, when they fail to notice or correctly interpret patient’s needs.” The nurses were not adequately fulfilling their required tasks. Overall, the problem of “compassion fatigue” required training because of the problems it caused on an organizational, person, and task level.
B. Whether or not the training solved the above issues is ambiguous because the hospital only evaluated some aspects of the issues. The hospital
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Whether or not the training program was effective is ambiguous. While it was effective in solving the problem of nurse’s ability to cope (based on the reports), the hospital did not evaluate how the program addressed the other problems in the workplace. The hospital should conduct an analysis on turnover rate to see if it decreased, and look at employee error rate to determine if the program helped employees better perform their task. Because the hospital only evaluated the effectiveness of the program in one problem area, it is difficult to determine whether or not the program was effective as a whole. Furthermore, the improvement in coping mechanism was self-reported by the nurses, so even that information might not be substantial evidence to prove the program was