Date of Award

2017

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Nursing (MSN)

Committee Chair

Quanza Mooring

Abstract

Nurses face a wide variety of challenges and demands while caring for their patients and families. While nurses are an important part of healthcare, both for their compassion and care and for their skills at the bedside, they can become stressed and burned out. Compassion satisfaction is essential for nurses in today’s society. Compassion satisfaction has been defined as the pleasure an individual derives from being able to help others and do their work to the best of their ability. The lack of compassion satisfaction can lead to compassion fatigue. Compassion fatigue affects the care provided to patients. Compassion fatigue leads to burnout. Burnout has been defined as physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion and can lead to nurse disengagement. The purpose of this thesis was to assess the actual relationship between nurses’ burnout and the patient load during their workdays as well as the relationship between nurse compassion satisfaction and burnout. The theoretical framework was based on Helen Erickson’s Modeling and Role Modeling Theory. The participants of the study were registered nurses or licensed practical nurses working at the bedside. Study results showed a significant relationship between burnout and compassion satisfaction, while showing no association between burnout and patient load. The data analysis showed no significant correlation between patient load and the likelihood of leaving the job in the next year.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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