Van Hoose, DianeThompson Pagan, Joan2024-12-202024-12-202024-04-09https://hdl.handle.net/10790/43911Background: The foundation of the nursing profession is caring, compassion, and creating authentic transpersonal relationships with patients. Compassion fatigue is a professional concern due to its impact on nurses' mental and physical health, professional quality of work satisfaction, and patient care interactions. Compassion fatigue, defined as emotional exhaustion, can profoundly impact the nurse-patient relationship. The literature defines self-care as the most common and effective strategy. For hospice organizations to deliver high-quality care, nurses need organizational initiatives to engage nurses in self-care to prevent compassion fatigue and to continue engaging in authentic, compassionate nurse-patient relationships. Methods: A quantitative descriptive design was applied to evaluate a self-care journal's impact on compassion fatigue in hospice nurses. Hospice nurses consented to use a monthly self-care journal, which allowed them to define their self-care activities with supported engagement through self-reflection, intention setting, habit tracking, cognitive and behavioral therapy, positive psychology, and journaling. The ProQOLv5 scale was completed to measure compassion fatigue through subscales of compassion satisfaction, burnout, and traumatic stress. Results: Data was analyzed using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test. The pre-intervention data reflected moderate levels of compassion satisfaction, low to moderate levels of burnout, and low to moderate levels of secondary traumatic stress. The impact of the self-care journals was statistically significant for the subscale of secondary traumatic stress (p = .039) but not significant for compassion satisfaction (p = .461) or burnout (p = .144). Although the nurses did not report extensive use of the journals, they evaluated the project as increasing their knowledge of compassion fatigue and would support future organizational initiatives.Other