Compassion Fatigue Analysis

My concept is compassion fatigue. Compassion fatigue (CF) as it relates to nurses working in an emergency department dealing with secondary trauma causing symptoms of compassion fatigue. The measurement tool, which I will use, is the Professional Quality of Life (ProQOL) scale. This scale has been in use since 1995 and has had several revisions, the last one updated in 2010 and it has been translated into 17 languages. The ProQOL measures compassion satisfaction (CS) and CF and its subcategories, burnout (BO) and secondary traumatic stress (STS). It is a pencil and paper Likert scale with 30 questions with 10 questions each reflecting CS, BO and STS. It was used by Potter, Deshields and Rodrigues (2013) in a pre-post test to establish if the resiliency program was successful and it was used more recently by Hunsaker, et al (2015) and Flarity, Holcomb and Gentry (2015) to measure the prevalence of compassion satisfaction and compassion fatigue among emergency room nurses and pre/post test to measure whether the intervention of a resiliency program had an impact on the nurses, respectively. The scale is readily available and easy to use and easy to self-score.

This scale is limited and measures BO only, which according my literature review has other influences instead of just the work environment, including but not limited to workload, patient acuity, and is more from chronic exposure to work stressors (Hinderer et al., 2014; (Hooper, Craig, Janvrin, Wetsel, & Reimels, 2010). The validity and reliability are good, and it was used along with the ProQOL scale in several studies, notably in Potter, Deshields, & Rodriguez (2013), but by using this scale alone, compassion satisfaction and some parts of compassion fatigue will be