"The story we are told is that compassion, which is increasingly demanded within health care, is finite. Health-care providers are finding it increasingly difficult to provide it — in the midst of growing patient workloads, paperwork, institutional demands and workplace stress. Like cars, when health-care providers use this fuel in their work, they run the risk of depleting their compassion “gas tanks” in the process.

The result: compassion fatigue.

But what if compassion fatigue is a myth? As an associate professor in the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Calgary, my research has focused on finding ways to improve compassionate care within health care. Members of my compassion research lab and colleagues across Canada have examined the concept of compassion fatigue within health-care research."