Nurses are often faced with many stressful situations in life, including personal life challenges, the nature of work that requires standing long and being focused, commitment to patient care, and dealing with patients who need help.
Research objective:
The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between empathy and compassion fatigue in nurses due to the mediating role of feeling guilty and secondary traumatic stress.
Research design:
This is a descriptive-correlation study.
Participants:
The statistical population consisted of all the nurses in Kerman hospitals in 2017. Five hospitals were randomly selected from among the private and public hospitals in Kerman. The sample size was considered 360, but after the deletion of misleading questionnaires, the final sample of study consisted of 300 nurses.
Ethical considerations:
Approval from the researcher’s university Institutional Review Board for ethical review was obtained.
Findings:
The data analysis in this study was done through the path analysis method using the Amos software. The results showed the mediating role of omnipotent guilt between empathy and compassion fatigue in the nurses, the mediating role of survivor guilt between empathy and compassion fatigue in the nurses, and the mediating role of secondary traumatic stress between empathy and compassion fatigue in the nurses. Also, empathy could explain 77% of the nurses’ compassion fatigue through feelings of guilt and secondary traumatic stress.
Discussion:
Pathogenic empathy-based guilt and secondary traumatic stress may help explain some of the links between clinical empathy and symptoms of compassion fatigue.
Conclusion:
Interventions and training programs targeting pathogenic empathy-based guilt and empathic secondary traumatic stress may be particularly important to help reduce compassion fatigue.
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