Özet:

It is very hard to take care of someone when they’re ill and witness them during their worst and most sensitive times at all. It is obvious that this will increase the emotional burden on the nurses. The feeling of compassion makes the patient seen as a ‘person’. How can such an important emotion create fatigue on the nurses? In this study we aimed to examine the compassion fatigue on nurses working at intensive care units. In order to ask questions to nurses to obtain information and to make determination required for solutions the projective (analytical) qualitative data collection method which is one of the qualitative methods is used. The research is carried out with 10 intensive care nurses. The importance of this study is that it is the first study in Turkey about not only compassion fatique but also compassion fatique of nurses. All data gathered from analyses categorized at 7 main themes. Based on emotional density of the answers it is found that nurses feel compassion fatique at 2 different levels. In this qualitative study, it is found that nurses often live compassion fatigue and in order to avoid this “mental or physical isolation” strategy is preferred in workplace or outside the work

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