Loss, Dying and Bereavement in the Criminal Justice System by Sue Read Sotirios Santatzoglou Anthony Wrigley

Author:Sue Read, Sotirios Santatzoglou, Anthony Wrigley [Sue Read, Sotirios Santatzoglou, Anthony Wrigley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138283572
Goodreads: 34498744
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-04-05T00:00:00+00:00

The significance of the work scope

As Lipsky says, a problem that street-level professionals have to confront is that ‘their work is their master’ (2010: 79). The definition of their work constitutes the contextual element which sets the limits of their discretion and therefore defines the scope of their compassion. Indeed, as Madden et al. (2012) argue, ‘organizational capacity for compassion can emerge under the right set of conditions’, meaning work-set conditions. As Atkins and Parker (2012) also indicate, ‘encouraging people to become more compassionate, without considering the associated self-regulatory demands’ can lead to serious implications on the psychological well-being of these professionals. Sawbridge and Hewison stress (2015) that ‘the emotional labour involved in sustaining kindness and compassion can exact an immense toll on nurses – in whatever setting they are employed.’ Therefore, the work scope can become the significant factor in the emergence (or non-emergence) of compassion. The study of Slocum-Gori et al. indicated that part-time palliative care nurses experience ‘a higher level of Compassion Satisfaction, and lower levels of Compassion Fatigue… than full-time ones’ (2011: 176). Compassion fatigue means ‘the emotional “cost of caring” for others’, which leads to ‘compromised’ practice (Slocum-Gori et al., 2011). Therefore, the part-time contract can be assumed as a defining work element which facilitates the compassionate care practice. Apparently, part-time nurses would be more prepared to be compassionate without compromising their care practice. However, when the work conditions are not ‘right’, the practitioners will have to compromise or otherwise defend or negotiate their work scope and, therefore, as Dunn and Rivas argue, ‘protect themselves from the experience of the patient by distancing self from the perceived vulnerability of suffering’ (2014: 48). Indeed, as Atkins and Parker argue, ‘developing psychological flexibility is a way of achieving more complex differentiation and integration of the self and emotions, ultimately enabling a focus on others that at the same time preserves a distinct sense of self’ (2012: 540). The work set or otherwise alienated practice work is a defining factor in adjusting ‘psychological flexibility’.

The work set is a significant ‘value’ of the ‘social architecture’ which ‘constrains’ or ‘enables’ professional action in general, and compassion in particular (Dutton et al., 2006: 74). From this point of view, the novel question is not whether professionals will show sympathy to the offender, but rather how the offender is placed within the ‘social architecture’ of their work. As one of the participants, palliative care professional PN6, said, ‘I think there’s two ways you see [offenders] : you see them both as patients and… as the relatives of patients, and it’s different depending on how you’re seeing them.’ In other words, it depends on how they are placed within the work scope. This becomes particularly evident in the accounts of those palliative care nurses who experienced offenders as palliative patients rather than as relatives of dying patients.

Palliative care nurse PN3 shared the experience of nursing a ‘convicted paedophile and rapist’. PN3 indicated that this patient ‘was in his late 50s/early 60s’ and ‘he had got learning difficulties’.

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