When Sarah Beth Hill stepped outside into the sweltering heat, hazmat suit and N95 mask clinging to her sweat-soaked body, she slumped down onto the nearest curb, trying to process the enormity of what she was experiencing.
As a hospice nurse during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Hill was forced to grapple with what it meant to be the last face many of her clients would ever see.
Sarah Beth Hill
Situations such as these help to explain the high rate of burnout among caregivers. Coping skills, education and support can ease this stress, allowing caregivers a moment to themselves – something Hill, who is now the director of nursing at Village Caregiving Columbus, says is essential to their well-being.
“It’s a job, but there are so many different stressors that come with being a caregiver, as opposed to any other job out there,” Hill says. “It’s just so much more emotional attachment, physical attachment, all of it.”
Defining and coping with burnout
Katharine McConnell, chief operating officer of interactive senior care at Comfort Keepers of Central Ohio, says attachment to clients often leads to burnout, especially when paired with demanding hours.
The Cleveland Clinic reports more than 60 percent of caregivers experience this “state of physical, emotional and mental exhaustion that happens while you’re taking care of someone else.”
Prioritizing self-care has never come easy for Hill, she says, or for other caregivers around her.
Katharine McConnell
“When it would come to trying to take those breaks, they always tell you, ‘Care for yourself. Make sure you are taking those mental breaks, or those health days, just to yourself,’” she says. “But when you’re thinking about that other person, it’s hard to do it.”
Hill developed her own coping skills, which include praying and walking every morning, as a hospice nurse. These techniques alone do not solve problems, though, which is why Hill and other experts emphasize the importance of education for caregivers.
Education first
According to the online caregiver training platform CareAcademy, inadequate training and lack of appreciation are leading causes of burnout.
“We believe that an empowered caregiver, someone that has knowledge of how to (take) care of themselves and then how to take care of a client, will do a better job when it comes to burnout,” McConnell says.
This education is instilled in Comfort Keepers’ caregivers the moment they begin training, she says, characterized by a focus on the whole of the caregiver.
Feeling supported
Support from employers, no matter how small, is not to be overlooked.
“Burnout can also happen when you feel ill equipped and ill supported,” McConnell says.
Both McConnell and Hill emphasize an uplifting environment, ensuring caregivers feel comfortable asking for extra support.
“We’re all busy, but when you get that phone call where you have a caregiver who’s with the client or just left the client, and they just need to decompress and tell me about their day, it’s being that listening ear, making sure you are putting that caregiver above whatever it is you are doing right now,” Hill says.
It’s personal
Another element that makes burnout so common is the profession’s personal nature, something McConnell felt deeply when caring for her grandmother.
“There’s a lot going on both in someone’s personal life and then their professional life, and then to add a loved one with extraneous needs is stressful,” McConnell says.
Unpaid family caregivers are particularly susceptible to burnout, with 40-70 percent reporting clinical symptoms of depression, and 23 percent stating that caregiving has negatively affected their physical health.
In fact, a 2023 survey showed that nearly 42 million Americans had offered unpaid care to an adult over 50 in the past year.
Hill says things also get personal for professional caregivers when family members of clients assert critical opinions.
“It can just be really, really depressing and hopeless when you feel that way, because you’re not going to make that person happy no matter what you do,” Hill says.
Despite these difficulties, McConnell believes the personal connections in healthcare are essential.
“The difficulty is almost the beauty,” McConnell says. “There’s something about both of those things being together.”
Wil Steigerwald is an editorial assistant at CityScene Media Group. Feedback welcome at feedback@cityscenemediagroup.com.
