COMPASSION FATIGUE AMONGST HEALTH CARE PROVIDERS

Compassion Fatigue in Health Care Providers

Abstract

Objective: To find out the frequency of compassion fatigue in health care providers in military hospitals.

Study Design: Cross sectional comparative study.

Place and duration of study: Armed Forces Post Graduate Medical Institute (AFPGMI), CMH Rawalpindi, MH Rawalpindi and CMH Sialkot from December 2013 to July 2014.

Patients and Methods: Two hundred and fifty four health care professional participated in the study. The participants included doctors, nurses and male nursing assistants.The instrument for collecting data consisted of ‘Professional Quality of Life Measure version 5’ (Pro QOL-5) questionnaire. Data was analysed by using IBM SPSS version 22. The alpha value was set at < 0.05 for significance.

Results: There were 128 male and 126 female participants with mean age of 31.72 ± 8.28 years. Reliability of the questionnaire was determined by Cronbach’s alpha which was calculated to be 0.81. Seventy nine participants (31.1%) showed low compassion fatigue, 168 (66.1%) showed average compassion fatigue whereas only 7 participants (2.8%) showed high compassion fatigue scores. The difference in frequency of three compassion fatigue levels was significant (p-value < 0.001). Compassion fatigue was significantly different amongst doctors, nurses and nursing assistants (p-value = 0.049). There was no effect of gender on the compassion fatigue score (p-value < 0.01).

Conclusion: Compassion fatigue is higher in doctors as compared to para medical staff irrespective of gender.