Strength of Sense of Coherence among Nurses and the Relationship between Socio-Demographic and Work-Related Factors

Factors related to resilience and attitudes towards care of the dying among critical care nurses

BACKGROUND

Many critical care nurses provide care to patients who are injured or ill and are at the end-of-life. Therefore, they are at high risk for developing negative emotional responses due to exposure to patient suffering and death.

AIM

To determine the association between attitudes towards care of the dying, resilience, and Sense of Coherence.

STUDY DESIGN

A cross-sectional descriptive approach was used. Head nurses at 74 hospitals in Japan were sent a letter about the study; 29 head nurses agreed to send information to the critical care nurses in their hospital. Demographic factors, attitudes towards care of the dying, resilience, and Sense of Coherence were collected using Google Forms. Structural equation modelling was used to analyze the associations among the variables.

RESULTS

A total of 229 nurses completed the survey. The average years of clinical experience were 10.5 ± 8.4 years. Factors directly related to positive attitudes towards care of the dying were higher resilience, more years of clinical nursing experience, and having a Master's degree. Sense of Coherence was the strongest predictor of resilience. Other predictors for higher resilience included confidence in nursing skills, social support, and religious beliefs towards death. The main predictor for higher Sense of Coherence was workplace satisfaction.

CONCLUSION

Nurses with higher resilience had more positive attitudes about care of the dying. Individual factors, such as a Sense of Coherence, confidence in caring for patients, and religious beliefs were the most important factors related to resilience.

RELEVANCE TO CLINICAL PRACTICE

It is necessary to support newer nurses especially those with lower educational attainment, to increase workplace satisfaction, Sense of Coherence and resilience. It is necessary to develop educational programs focused on care of dying patients and to evaluate their effect so that critical care nurses have a positive response to caring for dying patients.

Professional identity and sense of coherence affect the between compassion fatigue and work engagement among Chinese hospital nurses

BACKGROUND

With the continuous improvement of people's health needs, the public's requirements for medical care are also getting higher and higher. Work engagement is a positive psychological state related to the work. It is very important to maintain nurses' work engagement, however, due to many factors, the level of nurses' work engagement is not high and nursing managers should identify the influencing factors of work engagement, and take positive measures to fully improve nurses' work engagement.

OBJECTIVES

To explore the influence of compassion fatigue, professional identity and sense of coherence on nurses' work engagement.

METHODS

From January 2022 to June 2022, convenience sampling was used to select clinical nurses from 9 tertiary hospitals in Henan Province of China as the research objects for a questionnaire survey. Statistical methods included descriptive statistical analysis, Pearson correlation analysis and the PROCESS Macro Model 4 and 7 in regression analysis.

RESULTS

The results showed that compassion fatigue was significantly negatively correlated with sense of coherence, professional identity and work engagement (P<0.01), professional identity was significantly positively correlated with sense of coherence and work engagement (P<0.01), and there was a significant positive correlation between sense of coherence and work engagement (P<0.01). Professional identity played a partial mediating role between compassion fatigue and work engagement, accounting for 46.40% of the total effect; meanwhile, sense of coherence moderated the effect of compassion fatigue on professional identity and formed a moderated mediation model.

CONCLUSIONS

Compassion fatigue has a negative predictive effect on nurses' work engagement. Professional identity and sense of coherence further explained the relationship of compassion fatigue on compassion fatigue and work engagement through mediating and moderating effects.