Burnout

Caretaker Interview

Travis Ortiz

BSHS/445

November 28, 2016

Sandra Alger

In the field of Human Service work, burnout is very common, and many do suffer from this.  Here a caretaker was interviewed on their experience with burnout, and ways they cope and handle this type of situation in their profession.  They will also discuss the levels of burnout they experienced, and circumstances leading up to this event.  Some organizations may have ways to help employees prevent and manage their burnout, and we will identify key indicators that they experience leading up to burnout.  Along with burnout caretakers may experience compassion fatigue as well, this will be described and the differences between the two discussed.  

About the Interviewee

I decided to interview a woman who works in the substance abuse field, they have been counseling clients for roughly three years now and have experienced periods of burnout during this time.  She was asked an array of questions from their experience with burnout, what their organization does for their employees, and any advise she would give someone new coming into the field on preventing burnout or compassion fatigue.  They were also asked what they do for self-care, as this is a key way to help with burnout.  

         When asked when she had experienced burnout, she replied “ I have experienced it a few times in the duration of my time here, just recently I had a problem when we were understaffed and I was having to make for the lack of employees, I did not have much choice in the matter as we all needed to take on extra work to keep things rolling.”  She stated “ This put a lot of extra stress on me and others here, we really needed more staff, but because the census was low we could not hire any other counselors at the time.”  She was then asked what could have been different to alleviate the situation and she stated “ Well the work had to be done, but we all worked together to make sure that not one person was taking the brunt of the workload, and self-care was a vital part of keeping me going during this time, I had to take an extra day off here and there.”  Then she went on to discuss her self-care plan and explained “ I am a member of A.A so meetings are a must, I also do yoga, which the organization provides here for us once a week, I enjoy time with my kids, and go out of town when ever I get a chance.”  

        In continuing our discussion we went into discussing what advise she would give someone new to this field and if the organization she worked for offered any services.  She explained “ Well the only advise I could give would be is to learn to monitor themselves and try to keep stress to a minimum, if they begin to feel overwhelmed, notice they are not getting work done the way they want, or struggling and becoming irritable with clients and staff then they need to do something to take care of themselves, because if they are not in a healthy position for themselves then they will not be any good for anyone else.”  “ The organization I work for is pretty good at giving us time off when we need it, they also offer yoga class here once a week, other than that they really cannot do to much more as we are always understaffed.”  She was then asked if she has experienced more burnout or compassion fatigue and she replied, “ I feel that I have more of a burn out issue here because of the added stress of the workload and long hours of groups that I have to run, but I do experience some compassion fatigue as well.”  “ There has been clients that I have gotten to a point where I dread them coming in because it is either the same old thing that we have to keep working on, or they just keep lying to me about what is going on and either way I will loose focus on was to help them.”