Compassion fatigue is a warning sign aged care cannot ignore

For more than seven years I worked in HR management in residential aged care and it was some of the most meaningful yet challenging work I have ever done.

What it taught me is that burnout is rarely a personal failing, it’s what happens when a system asks people to give endlessly without designing for how they will be supported in return.

Aged care and health care sit at a genuinely difficult intersection. Care runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The workforce is often stretched while simultaneously being asked to deliver complex, skilled care with limited time for training and support.

Positioned at the centre of everything are our elders and patients. Theses people deserve patience, warmth, and connection, delivered by someone who still has something left to give, even on a demanding day. What I saw in my work, again and again, was not a workforce lacking resilience. It was a workforce giving generously, inside a system that needed to change.

The pressure is real

The data reflects what many people working in the sector feel in their day-to-day. Research published in npj Mental Health Research found that of the 1123 survey participants, more than half of residential aged care workers report elevated burnout, with notable proportions also experiencing symptoms of depression and anxiety.

Flinders University’s Caring Futures Institute points to something hopeful inside their research. Staff who feel their work has meaning, and who are recognised for the difference they make, are significantly less likely to experience burnout.

The same research links isolation, low managerial and peer support, and limited training to higher burnout risk, none of which are personal shortcomings. They are gaps in how the system around the people has been built.

Recognition, connection, training, and psychologically safe spaces cannot remain as optional extras layered on top of the work. They need to be prioritised and woven into the fabric of the organisation and recognised as just as essential to a functioning workforce system as rostering or compliance. When organisations design for these things deliberately, the system can start to support the people it depends on, instead of depleting them.

In caring industries, the people doing the giving are often the least likely to ask for anything back. They are usually driven by an intrinsic values alignment of wanting to make a difference to the lives of others. This is why compassion fatigue and burnout in this sector are difficult to notice early. Instead, staff keep going until they are beyond exhausted, unable to work, because they haven’t wanted to let anyone down.

The good news

Compassion fatigue, which is often something that precedes burnout, if noticed early in staff and ourselves, can be managed.

In my opinion, regular, genuine check-ins make a real difference, not as a box to tick, but as a moment where someone is actually asked how they are doing, with a leader who has the capacity to hold space for the answer. Realistic rostering matters just as much, recognising that a team running consistently at or below capacity will struggle, however dedicated they are.

Additionally, providing appropriate training and development as well as building in flexibility and a sense of ownership over how the work gets done gives people the right skills and agency, even within a sector that is highly compliance driven.

What a caring system looks like

Aged care and health care will always be demanding, because the humans at the centre deserve a workforce with genuine capacity to take excellent care of them. The encouraging news is that workforce capacity can be built. I have seen teams find greater energy once real connection, realistic workload and a degree of flexibility were put in place with intention.

If we want a caring workforce, we need a workforce that is also cared for. That is not a resilience problem for individuals to carry alone. It is a systems opportunity, and a deeply hopeful one, because unlike so many challenges in this sector, it is one we already know how to design our way toward.

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Sophie Bretag is the author of The Kind Way, and founder of Metta Leaders.