Touch is an essential part of caregiving and has been proved to be useful to reduce pain. Nevertheless, little attention has been paid to nurses' perceptions of touch. The aim of this article was to examine the relationship between nurses' feelings of comfort with touch and their well-being at work. A sample of 241 nurses attending a pain management training course completed a questionnaire, including the following measures: Comfort with Touch (CT) scale (task-oriented contact, touch promoting physical comfort, touch providing emotional containment), Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI; emotional exhaustion, cynicism), and Job Satisfaction. Results of structural equation models showed that touch providing emotional containment was the main predictor of emotional exhaustion. Emotional exhaustion, in turn, was positively related to cynicism and negatively related to job satisfaction. In addition, the direct path from touch providing emotional containment to cynicism was significant. Practical implications of the findings are discussed.

We aim to investigate nurses' feelings of comfort or discomfort with three different types of touch: task-oriented contact, touch promoting physical comfort, and touch providing emotional containment. A questionnaire was administered to a sample of 198 nurses. We present results of multiple regression analysis identifying some antecedents of nurses' feelings of comfort with touch, namely, attachment style, worry, gender, and length of service. Worry is negatively associated with task-oriented contact and touch promoting physical comfort. Attachment security and length of service are associated with comfort with touch aimed at emotional containment; female nurses feel more comfortable than male nurses in performing this type of touch. Practical implications of findings are discussed in relation to the promotion of focused training courses for practitioners who are willing to improve the quality of care services.

Future directions and implications for nursing research, education, and practice are discussed.

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