Evaluating the effectiveness of a self-care programme for intervention in burnout and compassion fatigue among nurses working in critical care areas

Abstract

This thesis is about evaluating the effectiveness of a self-care programme for intervention in burnout and compassion fatigue among nurses working in critical care areas. A convenient sampling method of all the nurses who work in the critical care areas as per the operational definition of terms for this study was used. A total of 154 nurses in a critical care area participated in this pre-post study, of which (n=83) were CTOP Nurses and (n=71) were Forensic Nurses. The nurses completed a biographical questionnaire, the Professional Quality of Life Scale (ProQOL R-IV), the Empathy Assessment Index Scale (EAI). Nurses were divided into groups of 6 to 10 people for focus group discussions on their work experiences. The results of the current study indicated moderate to high levels of burnout and compassion fatigue occurring with high compassion satisfaction among the nurses. However, the mean burnout scores for CTOP nurses and Forensic nurses and details indicated lack of statistically significant difference post-intervention (p>0.05). The study utilized the Context Process Outcome (CPO) model as its framework. The proximal outcomes centred around safe holding, development of awareness and self-care. Intermediate outcomes consisted of drop in burnout and compassion fatigue and the distal outcomes showed increase in empathy and revived motivation to continue work in critical areas as well as a drop in distress and increase in compassion satisfaction. The project was ground-breaking work of research with nurses in the critical areas with regards to health promotion with promise in healthier ways of caring for the carers and their empowerment and intervention outlook on the challenges around working environment stressors and interventions. Such work could in future benefit health care professionals by predicting possible decrease in their productivity by measuring other non-invasive constructs like empathy which has shown probable predictive power on development of burnout and compassion fatigue as well as improvement of satisfaction. Future research is recommended for inclusion of other health professions in such work and not only nurses, as well as doing evaluation that allows intermittent re-alignment whenever indicated in the process of intervention