Lazarus And Folkman's Theory Of Compassion Fatigue

The dream of every aspiring nursing student and registered nurse is providing not only physical care, but also emotional, mental and spiritual support to patients. Nevertheless, just like in many other professions, nurses have to deal with environmental and personal challenges as they provide care to the patients’ needs which at times turn out to be complex and diverse. As a result, nurses involved in the provision of direct care to particularly terminally ill patients end up suffering from compassion fatigue (CF) (Van Mol et al., 2015).

According to Chitra (2011), compassion fatigue is the price that caring and compassionate nurses have to pay and this involves mental, emotional, spiritual and physical exhaustion. Potter et al., (2013) noted

As earlier mentioned, Lazarus and Folkman’s theory has three main concepts. Stress, cognitive appraisal and coping; on the stress concept, a major underpinning is the impact of stress on an individual which is based more on the individuals’ feeling of vulnerability, threat and ability to deal with the stressful situation or event. Compassion fatigue is a culmination of the effects of continuous and cumulative process that is caused by compassionate care to terminally ill patients and exposure to stress (Coetzee and Klopper, 2010). Utilizing the concept of stress as proposed by Lazarus and Folkman (1984), compassion fatigue nurse victims must make a determination of what should actually amount to

Lazarus (1984) definition of stress (earlier mentioned) is a situation where an individual feels that the demands are more than the personal and socials resources. Utilizing the second concept in Lazarus’s theory- Cognitive appraisal, nurses experiencing compassion fatigue must assess whether their current situation threatens their well-being and whether there exists resources to meet the demands of the stressors (Gary Sturt, 2016). According to Gary Sturt (2016), there are the primary and secondary cognitive appraisal. During the primary cognitive appraisal, a nurse will be seeking answers as to the meaning of the current event (compassion fatigue) with regard to their well-being, that is, whether the current situation is irrelevant, good or stressful. During the secondary cognitive appraisal, a nurse will be seeking an answer as to whether there is the ability to deal with the problem (Gary Sturt,