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Abstract

Purpose: In healthcare professions, there has been a need for increased compassion to improve the quality of patient care.1,2,3 Yet, in this pursuit, health professionals have heavy workloads and longer working hours resulting in increased burnout and compassion fatigue.4,5 This stress is reducing clinicians’ ’ attention and concentration, distracting from decision making, decreasing effective communication and increasing fatigue, insomnia, heart disease, depression and obesity.2 Even with these sacrifices or “cost of caring” there has been a large decrease in the patient's quality of care and compassion.5 Research has shown that health professionals with high self-compassion it correlates with decreased stress, compassion fatigue and burnout.7 Method: A total of 158 participants, 90% of students, 51% of faculty, and 30% of clinical instructors, submitted a completed survey. Participants were invited to complete Neff's Self-Compassion Scale and Neff's Compassion for Others Scale. Both scales are a self-report measure comprised of statements which are rated on a 5 level Likert Scale from almost never to almost always and total mean score for 24 items. One-way ANOVA, Paired Samples T-tests and Pearson R correlations were used to explore differences between and within the groups. Results: Physical therapy students demonstrated significantly lower total self-compassion and compassion for others scores compared to educators and the greatest difference between scales (p=.000). Female students demonstrated significantly lower score for self-compassion and greatest difference in scores compared to male students (p=.000) and female educators (p=.003). Participants over 40 years old had higher scores in self-compassion compared to younger participants and younger participants had the greatest difference scale ratings (p=.000). Discussion: These results suggest that self-compassion curriculum may be helpful only for health professionals but also in the professional education curriculum to increase and possibly sustain self-compassion and decrease risk of compassion fatigue and burnout in new and experienced clinician. © 2018 King Saud bin AbdulAziz University for Health Sciences

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