Heterogeneity of compassion fatigue and its relationship with resilience among nurses: a latent profile analysis

Background Nurses often face high-intensity emotional load and work pressure in clinical work. This working environment makes nurses prone to compassion fatigue (CF), and resilience plays an important role in alleviating CF. Aims The purpose of this study is to identify the latent profile of nurses' CF and its population characteristics through latent profile analysis (LPA), and to explore the impact of resilience on the latent profile of CF. Design This study is a cross-sectional study. Methods A total of 453 nurses from six hospitals in Sichuan Province, China were recruited from December 2024 to April 2025. The nurses were surveyed using a general information questionnaire, a resilience scale, and a compassion fatigue scale. The latent profile of nurses‘ CF was determined by LPA using Mplus 8.3 software. IBM SPSS Statistics 27.0 software was used to explore the factors affecting the latent profile of nurses' CF through chi-square tests, one-way analysis of variance, and multivariate logistic regression analysis. Results There were three latent profiles of nurses‘ CF, namely Low CF ( n = 203, 44.8%), Medium CF ( n = 115, 34.2%) and High CF ( n = 95, 21%), which indicated that most nurses were in low and medium CF. Resilience, the number of daily nursing patients, and the number of night shifts per week may be influencing factors of the potential profile of nurses' CF ( P < 0.05). Conclusion CF of nurses can be divided into three potential profiles, and each potential profile is affected by different factors. Nursing managers should regularly assess and identify nurses with moderate or high levels of CF, rationally formulate scheduling plans and assign work tasks, and take targeted intervention measures to enhance nurses' resilience, which will help improve their quality of professional life.