A Study On Empathy Fatigue Of Medical Social Workers From The Perspective Of Emotional Labor

Medical social workers,as a helping profession,constantly face and digest the negative emotions and traumas of their clients in the service process,and need to empathically invest and perform emotional labor,and persistently expose themselves to traumatic phenomena while often neglecting their own emotional state,thus experiencing empathy fatigue.Empathy fatigue is a unique type of burnout that exists in the helping profession,referring to the discomforting symptoms of fatigue,burnout,and vicarious trauma that occur as a result of helping-type work that presupposes empathy and empathic skills in providing help and services to clients.Not only does it affect the psychological health state of medical social workers,but it also weakens the ability to help people and professional competence.Based on this,this paper attempts to analyze the full picture of empathy fatigue in medical social workers based on the theoretical framework of emotional labor,specifically including the generation,developmental history and impact outcomes of empathy fatigue in medical social workers,and propose paths to avoid empathy fatigue based on the findings of the study.This paper adopts qualitative research,taking F hospital as an example,10 medical social workers are selected,and the data are collected and summarized through qualitative research of in-depth interviews,and the interview data are analyzed,and the following conclusions are found: the developmental course of medical social workers’ empathy fatigue can be divided into gestation,accumulation and dissolution periods,and will go through three stages from empathy and fatigue,risk and challenge to reshaping and renewal.Different developmental processes have different causes and specific manifestations.Empathy fatigue has negative negative effects on MSWs,but there are also positive experiences of empathy satisfaction and self-growth.Finally,this paper explores the solution path of empathy fatigue through three dimensions: micro,meso and macro,from three aspects: helpers’ self-help,organizational care and supervision and creating a good professional atmosphere in society.This paper explores the process of empathy fatigue using emotional labor as a theoretical perspective,bridges the gap of lack of corresponding qualitative research,provides a more in-depth analysis of the empathy fatigue process of medical social workers,and further promotes the development of medical social workers.