-ABSTRACT-
Emergency Nurse’s Job Stress, Compassion Fatigue, and Nursing Performance
Eun-Mi Choi
Department of Nursing
Graduate School of Ajou University
(Supervised by Professor Bae Sun Hyoung, RN., Ph.D.)
This study is a descriptive correlation research attempted to identify the relationship between job stress, compassion fatigue, and nursing performance of emergency room nurse.
For the research, this study collected data from August 4 to September 26 on 133 nurses who work at emergency rooms of 3 general hospitals at Gyeonggi-do with 500 beds. For the research tool, this study used the ‘job stress tool’ developed by Mae-Ja Kim and Gu-Mi Ok (1984) and revised and supplemented by Myung-Sun Lee (2012). This study also used the Hyun-Ju Kim’s ‘compassion fatigue tool’ adapting Professional Quality of Life Scale : Compassion satisfaction/Fatigue Subscale – Version 5 (ProQOL) developed by Figley (1995), and revised and supplemented by Stamm (2010) and the ‘nursing performance tool’ developed by Hyun-Ok Baek (2004) and revised and supplemented by Yun-Hee Kim (2007).
The main research results were as follows.
1. In the research results, the mean of job stress was 178.63±29.08 and based on each area, ‘items related to parents and patient’ was the highest with 20.39±4.33 (4.07±0.86 on item mean) and ‘Psychological burden toward medical limit’ was the lowest with 14.12±3.00 (3.53±0.75 on item mean). The mean of compassion fatigue was 28.97±8.16. Te mean of nursing performance was 128.54±17.36 in average and based on each area, ‘job knowledge’ was the highest with 30.78±5.00 (3.84±0.62 on item mean) and the ‘attitude and talent’ was the lowest with 45.60±7.66 (3.50±0.58 on item mean).
2. Secondly, the analysis on difference of job stress, compassion fatigue, and nursing performance based on the general characteristic demonstrated that all general characteristics had no statistically significant difference. The nursing performance had statistically significant difference based on age (F=5.80, p<.001) and overall clinical career ((F=3.76, p=.013). On contrary, job stress had statistically significant difference based on the level of satisfaction for salary (t=2.72, p<.001).
3. The analysis on correlation between job stress, compassion fatigue, and nursing performance demonstrated that the job stress had significant positive correlation with compassion fatigue (r=.505, p<.001) and nursing performance (r=.214, p=.024). On the other hand, there was no statistically significant correlation between compassion fatigue and nursing performance (r=.090, p=.348).
The study results showed that an emergency room nurse experience job stress due to intensive compassion fatigue and nursing performance. Thus, it is necessary to develop the intervention programs to reduce job stress of an emergency room nurse by alleviating compassion stress and having moderate level of nursing performance.