Description
Empathy is espoused as the ultimate ‘soft-skill’ that vets and nurses need to be successful in veterinary practice. The assumption is that empathy and compassion in vets increases client satisfaction and therefore practice success through better compliance, better patient outcomes and better financial rewards. However, vets, particularly new graduates, are highly trained in clinical knowledge but lack the emotional intelligence skills of empathy and compassion to deal with the stressors of day to day practice, hence the burnout, anxiety and depression – so the story goes. The blame for this lies with generational factors (so-called ‘snowflakes’) student selection and curriculum, then with the under-staffed, over capacity busy-ness of practice, exacerbated by a recruitment crisis and topped off with a global pandemic. The current solution falls into two camps. 1. Reduce the pressure on vets by recruiting more vets – difficult - or filtering clients and reducing client numbers per vet – financially scary. 2. Fix the vets by introducing more resilience and welfare training initiatives in practice or part of CPD provision (mindfulness and decompression practices). All good advice if you take it up - but it really doesn’t seem to be working. When you keep applying the same answer to a problem and it continues to get worse, it may be time to re-define the problem. So maybe the expectations of empathy and compassion is the problem. Recent research has shown that vet participants with high levels of empathy have higher levels of client satisfaction, but also experienced a higher risk of poor mental health due to emotional labor (e.g., perceived stress, anxiety, emotional exhaustion). Paradoxically, vet compassion satisfaction appeared to have a negative relationship with client satisfaction… These strange results may explain that the pursuit of high levels of client satisfaction results in vets with high scores in anxiety, emotional exhaustion, and depersonalization, resulting in poor business performance. This webinar explores the research findings and proposes some solutions to this on-going dilemma in practice.
