Oct 30, 2026 · 26 min · 11 segments
Send us Fan Mail When a nurse makes an error with 20 things happening at once, is it really a personal slip, or a system that pushed her past…
And so I think that's such a nice transition from a talk we had earlier this morning with Dr. Jennifer Kett about secondary trauma in the NICU and how we didn't even quite get into this, but we know that witnessed trauma, lived trauma over time is cumulative, definitely plays a part in burnout, right? Causing people to leave homes.
But I think what is a understudied, not understudied, an underdiscussed component of that is when we lose empathy over time, which happens in burnout and moral distress, we take less good care of patients.
And I think that's an important, I'm not sure everybody wants to wrap their mind around the like lovey-dovey stuff, but if we care about the best outcomes for patients, we really have to understand that.
It is, we need that because at the end of the day, we are here because of the human.
And I'm at a neonatology conference because of these precious little humans who deserve the best care possible.
And we have to recognize that the people taking care of these precious humans are also precious humans.
And if we take care of the precious humans taking care of the precious humans, then that actually correlates.
And the human factor science actually shows it that if I have enough capacity, if my emotional bandwidth, my cognitive bandwidth, my physical bandwidth, if all of that is in balance and I'm able to then pour out what I can to this patient, then actually then the science shows that the care that this patient receives is going to be correlated as well.
And to your point, sometimes we think about physical workload, if I use that word workload, how stressed we are physically.
Sometimes we think about cognitive workload, all the different things in our brains, and we have to respect that and understand that.
But there's also this final component that we've been trying to discuss as well is the emotional workload.
And when you go through trauma, when you go through different experiences, we can't negate the impact on the human of all of those emotional aspects as well, because it does take a toll and we have to respect that.
I think that this slide you have here highlights that the limited capacity model, right? So we all have this range of optimal performance that takes in the individual and also the resources allocated to the individual.
And then you see as some of those things change, you move into the yellow and eventually into the red, the overload region where our task performance becomes very poor.
What are some of the things around either empathy science that impact our limited capacity model or I guess vice versa? How does the limited capacity model impact our empathy?
It is, again, understanding the work and understanding the humans in the work system.
And so I think that's such a nice transition from a talk we had earlier this morning with Dr. Jennifer Kett about secondary trauma in the NICU and how we didn't even quite get into this, but we know that witnessed trauma, lived trauma over time is cumulative, definitely plays a part in burnout, right? Causing people to leave homes.
But I think what is a understudied, not understudied, an underdiscussed component of that is when we lose empathy over time, which happens in burnout and moral distress, we take less good care of patients.
And I think that's an important, I'm not sure everybody wants to wrap their mind around the like lovey-dovey stuff, but if we care about the best outcomes for patients, we really have to understand that.
It is, we need that because at the end of the day, we are here because of the human.
And I'm at a neonatology conference because of these precious little humans who deserve the best care possible.
And we have to recognize that the people taking care of these precious humans are also precious humans.
And if we take care of the precious humans taking care of the precious humans, then that actually correlates.
And the human factor science actually shows it that if I have enough capacity, if my emotional bandwidth, my cognitive bandwidth, my physical bandwidth, if all of that is in balance and I'm able to then pour out what I can to this patient, then actually then the science shows that the care that this patient receives is going to be correlated as well.
And to your point, sometimes we think about physical workload, if I use that word workload, how stressed we are physically.
Sometimes we think about cognitive workload, all the different things in our brains, and we have to respect that and understand that.
But there's also this final component that we've been trying to discuss as well is the emotional workload.
And when you go through trauma, when you go through different experiences, we can't negate the impact on the human of all of those emotional aspects as well, because it does take a toll and we have to respect that.
I think that this slide you have here highlights that the limited capacity model, right? So we all have this range of optimal performance that takes in the individual and also the resources allocated to the individual.
And then you see as some of those things change, you move into the yellow and eventually into the red, the overload region where our task performance becomes very poor.
What are some of the things around either empathy science that impact our limited capacity model or I guess vice versa? How does the limited capacity model impact our empathy?
It is, again, understanding the work and understanding the humans in the work system.
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