Compassion fatigue, burnout, and compassion satisfaction: Implications for retention of workers.

The quality of service delivery in response to child maltreatment is significantly affected by the ability of organizations to recruit and retain competent, committed staff (Alwon & Reitz, 2000; Pecora, Briar, & Zlotnik, 1989). Implementing the requirements of the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, strategic responses to class action lawsuits, agencies’ efforts to achieve accreditation, and states’ efforts to address the Program Improvement Plans (PIP) resulting from their federal Child and Family Services Reviews have brought renewed urgency to recruitment and retention problems in child protection related organizations (Zlotnik, DePanfilis, Daining, & Lane, 2005). Prior research has suggested that both organizational factors (e.g., better salary, supervisory support, reasonable workload, coworker support, opportunities for advancement) and personal factors (e.g., professional commitment to children and families, previous work experience, education, job satisfaction, efficacy, personal characteristics, role overload/conflict stress, and burnout, including emotional exhaustion which is a component of burnout most linked to turnover) affect the decisions made by child protection staff to stay or not stay in service organizations (Zlotnik et al., 2005). The purpose of the Conrad and Kellar-Guenther (2006) study in this issue of the Journal was to understand better the risk of compassion fatigue (the trauma suffered by the helping professional) and burnout (emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced sense of personal accomplishment), and the potential for compassion satisfaction (the fulfillment from helping others and positive collegial relationships) among child protection staff in Colorado. In this study, approximately 50% of child protection staff suffered from high or very high levels of compassion fatigue, but the risk of burnout was considerably lower. Participants with high compassion satisfaction had lower levels of compassion fatigue and lower levels of burnout. Overall, more than 70% of staff expressed a high or good potential for compassion satisfaction. Based on the findings from this study, the authors believe that compassion satisfaction may help mitigate the effects of burnout.