The future of veterinary caregiving: finding our way forward with wisdom and compassion.

Abstract

To be alive is to know both pain and joy. Pain may be inevitable, but suffering is optional. Our ubiquitous negativity bias may have many in caregiving roles around the world focused on the negative impacts of compassion fatigue syndrome and/or of burnout in the workplace, particularly over the last 2.5 years since the COVID-19 pandemic impacted every aspect of our lives. However, do you know about compassion satisfaction or about eudaimonia? Keep reading. Veterinary professionals are some of the most intellectually curious, generous, and intuitively caring individuals. Choosing a profession with rigorous and stressful admission criteria and training to then focus their life’s work on caring for non-human species’ health and well-being demonstrates a commitment to compassionate community service. However, the majority of veterinary caregivers would admit that the community they feel compassion for and wish to focus their healing energy on is the veterinary patient, not necessarily the inevitable humans that come with the equation. Herein lies the conundrum: the emotional, physical, and psychological challenges that come with working as a veterinary caregiver are compounded by these necessary human interactions. Preparation and strategies to skilfully navigate these interactions have been historically sparse, but fortunately are growing in curricula, in training programmes, and through professional literature and resource sharing. There is a psychosocial concept that when utilised can support self-efficacy of caregivers during difficult emotional and psychological circumstances: “Name it to tame it.” The human medical community has been actively exploring and researching the myriad of caregiving challenges and potential impacts on caregivers for over 40 years. It is understood that just as the wellbeing of individuals and teams may be compromised by detrimental work factors, so may be the quality of patient care and professional fulfilment for medical professionals. Many of the same work-related concerns such as moral distress, secondary traumatic stress, compassion fatigue, and caregiver burnout experienced by medical workers are recognised in veterinary professionals as well. However, it is only in the last 10 years that the awareness and subsequent conversations that “name” these concerns are being investigated as they pertain to veterinary work and environments. With that, novel approaches to support caregiver well-being and cultural shifts that support growth, safety, and flourishing in practice environments are being discussed globally. Fortunately, there is an abundance of resources, tools, and approaches that have been identified and developed to support the health and quality of professional life for humane caregivers that can be drawn upon and applied to the many veterinary ecosystems. The New Zealand Veterinary Association Wellbeing Symposium (8–9 November 2022) and this issue of the New Zealand Veterinary Journal with its associated online Collection, are exploring some of these topics and strategies such as mindfulness practices, acceptance and commitment training, novice professional preparation and mentorship, ethics and ethical conflict in veterinary medicine, and building healthy coping strategies and resilience. In the spirit of clarifying vocabulary so that we can speak a common language to create well-being strategies for medical caregivers, an article published in February 2022 is worth discussing here. This Iran-based study of nurses explored workplace factors and psychosocial variables on medical nurses’ well-being and occupational status. The focus was to explore the relationship between the nurses’ professional quality of life, mindfulness, and hardiness during the outbreak of COVID-19 (Zakeri et al. 2022). The Professional Quality of Life (ProQOL) questionnaire, Occupational Hardiness questionnaire, and Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory – Short Form were used to explore these questions. The ProQOL survey (Stamm 2010) has been used extensively in both human medical and veterinary research endeavours that explore secondary traumatic stress (that contributes to compassion fatigue), compassion satisfaction, and burnout factors since being developed by Beth Stamm in 2010. The other two surveys were not familiar to me but were also apparently developed to explore professional well-being (Buchheld et al. 2001; MorenoJiménez et al. 2014). To frame the valuable results of this study and others like it that were published between 2020 and now, it would be useful to define the psychosocial elements impacting the well-being of caregivers that were being investigated. Compassion stress is the unavoidable strain experienced when helping patients and clients that are in distress. This sense of responsibility and desire to alleviate suffering can contribute to either medical caregiver fatigue or to compassion satisfaction. When a sense of purpose and professional satisfaction are derived from working as a care provider, positive feelings towards one’s own and coworkers’ abilities to contribute to the better good are fostered. Gratification and professional fulfilment, which are essential ingredients for professional thriving, are strengthened as a result. These are the components of compassion satisfaction (Singer and Klimecki