Healthcare professionals’ wellbeing can be adversely affected by the intense demands of, and the secondary traumatic stress associated with, their job. Self-compassion is associated with positive wellbeing outcomes across a variety of workforce populations and is potentially an important skill for healthcare workers, as it offers a way of meeting one’s own distress with kindness and understanding. This systematic review aimed to synthesise and evaluate the utility of self-compassion interventions in reducing secondary traumatic stress in a healthcare worker population. Eligible articles were identified from research databases, including ProQuest, PsycINFO, ScienceDirect, Google Scholar, and EBSCO. The quality of non-randomised and randomised trials was assessed using the Newcastle–Ottawa Scale. The literature search yielded 234 titles, from which 6 studies met the inclusion criteria. Four studies reported promising effects of self-compassion training for secondary traumatic stress in a healthcare population, although these did not use controls. The methodological quality of these studies was medium. This highlights a research gap in this area. Three of these four studies recruited workers from Western countries and one recruited from a non-Western country. The Professional Quality of Life Scale was used to evaluate secondary traumatic stress in all studies. The findings show preliminary evidence that self-compassion training may improve secondary traumatic stress in healthcare professional populations; however, there is a need for greater methodological quality in this field and controlled trials. The findings also show that the majority of research was conducted in Western countries. Future research should focus on a broader range of geographical locations to include non-Western countries.

This short report presents an international research group, Research Ensemble for Advancement in Cross-cultural Healthcare (REACH). REACH is an independent research group, and no one is paid to do research for REACH. All members participate because they are intrinsically motivated to pursue cross-cultural healthcare. REACH consists of 28 healthcare workers and educators from 13 countries, researching about cross-cultural issues in healthcare (18 publications on average per year as of February 2024). REACH is multi-disciplinary, synthesising knowledge from areas such as cross-culture, mental health, psychotherapy, psychology, nursing, disabilities, education, and organisational management. We anonymously asked ourselves what the strengths and challenges of REACH were, and thematically analysed the input. Strengths were a sense of community and growth. Challenges were different time zones and practices. We hope our insights will help international researchers organise an international research group.

Personality structural dissociation (PSD) describes how traumatisation can structurally alter innate psychobiological system organisation and give rise to dissociative parts of one’s personality. Acute, complex and severe trauma-related psychopathologies are described and, the presentations are heterogeneous. Eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR) targets traumatic memories through alternating bilateral stimulation and integrates them within adaptive memory networks. Internal family systems (IFS) is a systemic ego-state modality that can promote positive cognitive interweaves and facilitate trauma processing through attunement, visualisation and self-compassion. Integration of IFS with EMDR (IFS-EMDR) may be more suitable for resourced and titrated trauma-processing with complex and severe PSD. This paper seeks to explore the manifestation of innate psychic multiplicity within trauma-related psychopathologies as described by PSD. The effectiveness of IFS-EMDR is also proposed as a potential treatment approach. We outline a theoretical framework for the co-existence of dissociative and IFS parts and describe how prominent symptomatology can be addressed through a phase-oriented protocol, comprising stabilisation, trauma processing and reintegration. Insights offered in this paper can help psychotherapists support individuals living with PSD to navigate paced trauma-processing and subsequent personality integration.