Date of Award
2017
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science in Nursing (MSN)
Committee Chair
Abigail Garlock
Abstract
Often nurses are consumed by providing care to others and forget to care for themselves. The lack of self-care can lead to compassion fatigue in the nurse's life. The purpose of this thesis was to assess the level of compassion fatigue within medical surgical nurses, and determine the correlation between years of experience as a registered nurse and compassion fatigue. The Professional Quality of Life (ProQOL-5) was used to identify the existence of compassion fatigue in medical surgical nurses. Data was collected and analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) software. Seventy-five medical surgical nurses working in an acute care hospital completed the survey. Each participant's survey results provided a score for compassion satisfaction, burnout, and secondary traumatic stress. The results showed that years of experience had a positive correlation with burnout and secondary traumatic stress, and a negative correlation with compassion satisfaction. However, these correlations were not significant. Keywords: compassion fatigue, burnout, secondary traumatic stress, compassion satisfaction
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Citation Information
Simmons, Ashlee Nicole, "Compassion Fatigue in Medical Surgical Nurses" (2017). Nursing Theses and Capstone Projects. 281.
https://digitalcommons.gardner-webb.edu/nursing_etd/281