Whether you work for a busy metropolitan medical group, a small rural clinic, or provide home healthcare, your day-to-day interaction with patients and their families can take its toll by the end of a workday. As someone wise once told us, if you have your front door (heart) open, it's important to learn ways to open the back door...or all the grief gets stuck in the middle.

Stress, burnout and compassion fatigue, are becoming the biggest issues in healthcare today. Because we understand the need firsthand, we created the HEART WIDE OPEN – Self-Care for Caregivers handbook because we wanted to find a way to help rather than complain about it. We filled it with gentle reminders and simple suggestions you can do, even in the middle of a very busy day. Some people say they feel relief just holding it in their hands! Others use it as a touchstone to remind them to remember to take good care of themselves too. After all, if you don’t take good care of yourself, how can you take care of anyone else? ...more