How to Prevent Compassion Fatigue

Assignment: Self-Reflection

From the first day of this class until now, you have been focusing all of your energy on creating a warm, welcoming, professional, and empowering environment for your clients. Now it is time to focus on you! Without a healthy “you” there won’t be caring and compassionate people like you for clients to see when they need you the most. So it is only fitting that your last brief written Assignment in this class is about you.

Professor Owens talks about compassion fatigue in the introductory video to this unit. The best way to stay emotionally and physically healthy in this profession and avoid compassion fatigue is to have your own personal self-care plan – and to make sure you follow it! Your final brief written Assignment provides you with the opportunity to create your self-care plan for you and also to reflect on your experience in this course and how it has influenced you. When you are ready, please write a one-and-a-half to two-page self-reflection paper based which addresses the following three areas:

1.Area I – How to Prevent Compassion Fatigue: Using your favorite internet search engine or the search engines in the Kaplan University Library, enter the term “compassion fatigue” and find an article or a website that has information on compassion fatigue and how to prevent it. Define the term compassion fatigue and briefly summarize some of the causes of this in the helping professions as well as some of the suggested strategies to prevent it. (Make sure you appropriately cite any information you summarize or quote directly from your source and include the full APA Style reference for your source at the end of your paper. This is the only required reference in this Assignment unless you choose to include other cited works.)

2.Area II – My Personal Self-Care Plan: Think about what you know about yourself as a caregiver and the requirements in this field. What might become sources of compassion fatigue for you if you are not careful? Briefly summarize your self-reflections and then come up with your own self-care plan to safeguard against these potential burn-out items. Describe something you can do, and plan to do, every day to nurture and maintain your own emotional and physical health.

3.Area III – How this Class has Changed Me: Think back to where you were before starting this class. What did you know about case management or maybe what did you not know about it? Reflect back over the past nine weeks and everything you have experienced in this class: the videos, the Readings, your discussions with classmates, and the Assignments. Has this experience expanded or changed your view of working with clients? Do you know things today that you didn’t know nine weeks ago? When you are ready, write a brief closing reflection on how this class experience has influenced you as a human service professional. If for some reason, you do not feel you have been affected in any way by this experience, use this final area of your paper to discuss why you feel this to be the case.

Note: This is an informal reflection paper, so please feel free to use first-person pronouns as appropriate, like “I,” “me,” “my,” etc.

I have attached an article from our library that you can use as a reference