Does self-compassion mitigate the relationship between burnout and barriers to compassion? A cross-sectional quantitative study of 799 nurses
Section snippets
What is already known about the topic?
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Burnout is widespread among nurses and thought to have numerous negative correlates, including those related to their ability to deliver compassionate care.
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Prior researchers have typically linked burnout with other compassion-related forms of burnout (such as compassion fatigue) and have failed to illuminate factors that might buffer or attenuate this relationship.
What this paper adds
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The paper extends knowledge beyond compassion fatigue to consider how burnout may manifest in specific barriers to compassionate patient care.
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The development of self-compassion (the ability to care for the self in times of stress) may reduce the experience of carer, patient, environmental, and clinical barriers to compassion.
Participants
Of the 799 registered nurses included in this report, 93.90% were female. The participants’ average age was 45.47 years (SD = 11.81), average clinical experience was 26.12 years (SD = 12.77), and they predominantly identified as New Zealand European (65.30%), followed by British (12.80%) (see Table 1 for details). Nearly three quarters (73.8%) were New Zealand educated, the remainder being educated in the United Kingdom (14.30%) and elsewhere. Approximately half (54.80%) of the sample worked
Correlational analysis
Preliminary correlational analysis (see Fig. 1 and Table 2) showed that while increased experience was positively associated with lower barriers and greater self-compassion, being female predicted less self-compassion. Interestingly, workload was positively associated with burnout and environmental barriers but not with patient/family or clinical barriers; these three variables were retained as controls in primary analyses. As expected, there was a positive association between greater burnout
Discussion
In extending prior research linking professional burnout to compassion-related outcomes, the current report found the expected association in which greater burnout predicted greater burnout-related, patient and family, clinical, and environmental barriers to compassion in a large sample of nurses. In seeking to identify personal, resiliency-type factors of relevance, we also tested whether self-compassion (a) predicted lower barriers and (b) might weaken these relationships. However, while
Limitations, future directions, and practical implications
Although this report provides a useful contribution to work linking burnout and compassion in the helping professions, it has several limitations. The report relies on a convenience sample completing self-report measures, employed a cross-sectional and observational design, and did not evaluate specific types of burnout and self-compassion. The associations among self-report measures may be exaggerated by method factors (Podsakoff et al., 2012) or by social desirability, self-presentational,
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