“The expectation that we can be immersed in suffering and loss daily and not be touched by it is as unrealistic as expecting to be able to walk through water without getting wet" (Remen, 1996). Professional ethics and standards of care require physicians and nurses to keep secrets; they must live with the memories of split-second decisions often made by instinct and they can endure the multitude of patients' pain and suffering day after day.
Yet physicians and nurses are human beings who feel pain like everyone else. These demands, and the associated day-to-day challenges of working in healthcare, if not noticed and dealt with in a caring , compassionate manner, can take their toll on doctors and nurses, leading to mental health problems and reduced job satisfaction.
As a result of all the previous, we tried to shed some light on terms that appear to be unknown to many, such as, compassion fatigue, compassion satisfaction, burnout syndrome and secondary traumatic stress to help improve caregivers' experience with work, for the sake of both, the patients and the caregivers themselves.
AIM:
The aim of this work was to estimate the prevalence of compassion fatigue/satisfaction and burnout syndrome among critical care physicians and nurses in Alexandria University Hospitals, to identify the risk factors among them and to know whether methods of psychological contemplation and convalescence from working in critical care are practiced.