Prevalence of Compassion Fatigue and Associated Factors Among Nurses Working in Adult Intensive Care Units at Public Hospitals in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 2021.

Abstract

ABSTRACT Introduction: Compassion Fatigue is a secondary traumatic stress impacts nurses through exposure to pain, suffering, and loss of those for whom they provide care and results in a reduction of compassion satisfaction. It has been suggested that nurses working in intensive care units could be emotionally affected by end-of-life issues, ethical decision making, observing the continuous suffering of patients, disproportionate care or medical futility, miscommunication, and demanding relatives of patients. Therefore, the aim of this study to assess the prevalence of compassion fatigue and associated factors among nurses working in intensive care unit at public hospitals in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia Objective: To assess the prevalence of compassion fatigue and associated factors among nurses working in adult intensive care unit at public hospitals in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Methods: Institution based cross-sectional study was conducted among nurses who works in adult intensive care unit at public Hospitals in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia from December 10th 2021 to January 15th, 2022. Data was collected by using self-administered questionnaire. The data was checked, sorted, coded and entered in to Epi-data software and exported to using Statistical Package for Social Sciences for further analysis. Descriptive statistics like; median and Interquartile range for continuous variables that skewed distribute, and frequencies and percentage for categorical variables were estimated. Bivariate and multivariable logistic regression analyses were computed to identify significant variables. Odds ratios with 95% confidence interval were used to determine the strength of association between dependent and independent variables. In all analysis p-values ≤ 0.05 was considered as statistically significant. Results: In this study 360 nurses were involved. Of these, more than half (52.78%) of respondents were females. Two hundred nineteen (60.83%) of study subjects were married and 200 (55.56%) of the study participants scored as having compassion fatigue. Work experience of <3 years (AOR = 16.24; 95%CI: 4.80-55.00) and 4-7 years (AOR= 4.90; 95%CI: 1.46-16.42), night duty shift (AOR= 0.20; 95%CI: 0.06-0.67), neuroticism (AOR=1.05; 95%CI: 1.02-1.09), and social support (AOR=1.05; 95%CI: 1.03- 1.07) were significantly associated with compassion fatigue. Conclusion: The compassion fatigue among nurses working in the intensive care unit of a public hospital was high (55.56%). Keywords: Compassion Fatigue, Nurses, intensive care units, public hospitals, Addis Ababa.