The Relationships of End-of-life Care Stress with Compassionate Competence and Attitudes toward End-of-life Care among Pediatric Nurses

Abstract

Purpose: This study aimed to provide basic data for developing interventions to relieve the end-of-life care stress experienced by pediatric nurses by examining the relationships of end-of-life care stress with compassionate competence and attitudes toward end-of-life care. Methods: Data were collected via a survey that was conducted from September 10 to September 30, 2018 and administered to 113 nurses who had worked for more than 6 months in a pediatric unit at a tertiary hospital in Seoul, South Korea. The data were analyzed for frequency, percentage, mean, and standard deviation, and the independent t-test, one-way analysis of variance, and Pearson correlation analysis were conducted using SPSS version 25.0. Results: End-of-life care stress among pediatric nurses had a weak positive correlation (r=0.216, P＜0.05) with compassionate competence and had no significant correlation with attitudes toward end-of-life care. Among the sub-factors of end-of-life care stress, psychological difficulties had a weak positive correlation with sensitivity (r=0.309, P ＜0.01) and communication (r=0.230, P＜0.05), which are aspects of compassionate competence. Lack of knowledge about end-of-life care had a weak positive correlation with communication (r=0.209, P＜0.05) as an aspect of compassionate competence. Conclusion:To improve the quality of end-of-life care provided by pediatric nurses, it is necessary to improve their compassionate competence and reduce their end-of-life care stress by developing education and support programs tailored to the characteristics of children and specific communication methods.

Level of Knowledge in Palliative Care, Preparation and Capacity to Provide Care at the End of Life by Health Professionals

“…The measured perceptions of emotional intelligence, self-efficacy, attitudes toward EOL care and preparation and capacity to provide EOL care revealed a moderate overall average value and can be the target of improvements through internal training plans, institutional debates on the theme and adoption of an information sharing policy. These results are following literature data (Choi & Yu, 2022;Park & Jeong, 2021;Wang et al, 2022). Regarding spirituality, the global mean of the scale indicated a median value of 5.06 ± 2.30.…”

“…The assessment of health professionals' attitudes toward EOL care revealed a higher score (3.51 ± 1.14) translating into a positive attitude. In the current literature, the values found are variables: 4.26 ± 0.63 (Ho et al, 2022); 3.63 ± 0.34 (Park & Jeong, 2021); 2.91 ± 0.18 (Chu & Jang, 2021); 3.46 ± 0.26 (Park & Oh, 2019). Recent literature indicates that doctors recognize that patients have the right to make decisions about their health and the treatments offered, and geriatric patients should be included in the discussion of EOL care, highlighting the ethical principle of autonomy (Salabarría-Peña et al, 2022).…”