Nursing students’ level of compassion and thoughts about compassion fatigue

Abstract

Since humane and good nursing care cannot be provided without compassion, it is undeniable that every intervention made with a sense of compassion will cause less pain to individuals and negative experiences will decrease. This research was conducted to evaluate the compassion levels of nursing students and their strategies to prevent compassion fatigue. The population consisted of 350 undergraduate nursing students in a state university. The information form consists of questions related to the socio-demographic characteristics of the participants, the nursing profession, empathy and compassion, and the Compassion Scale were used to obtain data. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics (frequency, percentage, mean and median), Mann Whitney U and Kruskal Wallis test. It was observed that there was a significant difference in the compassion and conscious awareness dimensions of the scale among those who thought that institutional strategies should be used to prevent compassion. The level of compassion fatigue is mostly experienced in the dimension of emotional problems (36.6%), excessive professional workload (46.9%) is seen as the trigger of compassion fatigue, and the majority of participants think that institutional strategies should be used to prevent compassion fatigue (85.5%). has been found. It was determined that the students’ average compassion scale score was 3.97 ± 0.46. It is concluded that nursing students experienced compassion fatigue due to excessive workload, and they thought that it was important to implement institutional strategies to prevent it. Nursing students’ awareness of compassion fatigue should be increased and students should be supported to develop their own strategies to overcome compassion fatigue.