A qualitative study on compassion fatigue experience and influencing factors of geriatric nurses

Objective: With the rapid development of an aging society, the workload of geriatric nurses is increasing, but their psychological health issues are not receiving enough attention. This study explores the experience of compassion fatigue and its influencing factors among geriatric nurses, and provides targeted recommendations. Methods: This qualitative study, conducted at the Guangzhou First People's Hospital. Sixteen nurses of a geriatric department were selected using purposive sampling and subjected to semi-structured in-depth interviews. The study was carried out from September 2022 to February 2023, Colaizzi's method was used to analyze the qualitative data obtained from the interviews. Results: Three main themes were extracted from the analysis: compassion fatigue greatly affects my personal mentality, various things can cause nurses to experience compassion fatigue, and compassion fatigue causes many problems in the lives and work of nurses, including ten sub-themes. Conclusion: This qualitative study reports nurses in geriatric department are prone to compassion fatigue. The factors influencing nurses' compassion fatigue need to be correctly identified so that targeted pre-control strategies can be adopted to promote nurses' physical and mental health, increase compassion satisfaction and reduce burnout.