The Effects of Resilience and Self-efficacy on Nurses' Compassion Fatigue

Summary

Among healthcare providers, nursing is a stressful and compassionate profession. Nurses empathetically support patients with pain, loneliness, disease and even confronted with death in line with their critically physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual needs and provide comfort, help, presence for them. Because nurses are frequently exposed to highly stressful and emotional situations, they suffer compassion fatigue (CF) over time under repeated exposures. CF will have a series of physiological, social, emotional, spiritual, and cognitive effects on nurses, threatening the existential integrity of them. The effects include high rates of anxiety and depressive disorders, decreased productivity, increased clinical errors, decreased quality of care and level of job satisfaction. Therefore, it is particularly important to pay attention to compassion fatigue to maintain mental health of nurses.

Compassion fatigue refers to that in the process of providing assistance, the helper bears the pain of the recipient due to empathy, which reduces the helper's own energy or interest.Based on a widespread conceptual model, CF consists of two constructs: burnout and secondary traumatic stress. Nurses are at a great risk of compassion fatigue. CF is gradually becoming a serious problem which can affect nurses' physical and psychological health, performance, job satisfaction and quality of care . Thus, investigating the prevalence of CF among nurses and its related factors are warranted to prevent CF among nursing population.

Research has studied the influencing factors of CF. Some studies have found that the demographic characteristics, worked related factors , the degree of exposure to traumatic events and psychological factors are important factors affecting nurses' compassion fatigue. Some studies suggest that resilience, social support, sense of control and meaningful recognition are negatively correlated with CF . Among them, resilience and self-efficacy are considered as important psychological factors affecting the individual's mental health, and they play an important role in the occurrence of CF.

The working pressure of clinical nurses comes from the situations that they are exposed to patients' traumatic events and give excessive empathy for a long-term. CF among nurses is an undesirable outcome caused by maladaptation to this pressure. What's more, resilience, and self-efficacy play an important role in individual coping and psychological adjustment in face of stressful events. Therefore, it is necessary to explore the roles of resilience and self-efficacy in the process of CF.

According to the theoretical path analysis of professional caregivers' quality of life, work environment, client environment and person environment factors have an influence on the development of compassion fatigue . Regarding to the psychological stress system , When confronted with stressful events, the individuals will have a stress response as a joint result of environmental factors and personnel factors. Thus, in accordance with the above two theories, being exposed to traumatic events is considered as a stressor, which could lead to CF. During this process, several external factors (work-related environmental factors) and internal factors (personality, social support) have effects on CF. In this study, resilience, and self-efficacy will be recognized as individual psychological characteristics and CF will be treated as a psychological change. Although there have been several studies on the predictors of CF in nurses around the world, limited knowledge exists in considering both internal factors (resilience and self-efficacy) and external predictive factors (demographic, work-related factors) of CF among nurses, especially in mainland China.

The study aims to investigate the level of compassion fatigue among Chinese nurses and test the influences of demographic characteristics, work-related factors, resilience, and self-efficacy on compassion fatigue.

Conditions

• Compassion Fatigue
• Self Efficacy
• Resilience

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Central South University

  lead OTHER

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2019-10-03

Primary Completion

2019-11-10

Completion

2019-12-15

Countries

• China

Study Locations