Effectiveness of Self Instructional Module on Relieving Compassionate Fatigue among Nurses in KSMC

Background: When Compassion Fatigue is fund in a workplace, the organization itself suffers. Because of compassion fatigue, the institution may face Chronic absenteeism, sick leave, wish to betransferred, high turnover rates and conflicts between employees, as well as conflict between staff and the management and these all will create additional stress on the workers. Compassion Fatigue Awareness isspecially to educatethe caregivers about the genuine, sustainable self-care and help to the organizations to reach their goals, which will enable the staff nurses to serve with compassion and care. Objective: The study has been conducted to assess the level of compassionfatigue among nurses before and after giving the self-instructional module and to find out the association between the pre and post level of compassion fatigue with their selected demographic variables. Methods: Professional Quality of life scale (ProQOL) was used to assess the compassionate fatigue among the staff nurses. This scale has three parts; Compassion Satisfaction Scale, Burn out Scale and Secondary Traumatic Scale. Totally150 nurses were selected using Convenience Sampling Technique. Pretest followed by self-instructional module was distributed to the samples and post test was conducted. Results: While assessing compassion satisfaction, in the pretest, 96 % nurses had low compassion satisfaction and 4 % had average level, where as in the post test, 30.7 % had low and 69.3 % of the nurses improved and had got average compassion satisfaction. While assessing the burn out, in the pretest 49.3 %of nurses had low and 50.7 % of nurses had average level of burn-out. However, in the post test all (100 %) the nurses attained low Burn out stage. While assessing the secondary trauma, in the pretest 70 % had low and 80 % had average level of secondary trauma. On the other hand, in the post test, the same was improved as the low was96 % and the average was 4 %. While finding the effectiveness of health education on compassion fatigue among the nurses, the pretest compassion satisfaction means score was 23.65.9. The posttest compassion satisfaction means score was 43.82.8. The difference between the means was statistically highly significant (Pless than0.001). The burn-out mean score at thepretest was 40.87.2 and the posttest mean was 19.64.1. The difference between the burn out means was statistically highly significant (Pless than0.001). The secondary traumatic mean score at thepretest was 41.06.5 and theposttest was 21.86.3. The difference between the means was statistically highly significant (Pless than0.001). Conclusion: The findings showed that health education (self-instruction module) was effective in reducing the compassion fatigue among the nurses. It also suggests the necessity of planning and implementing health education programmes in hospitals for thenurses so as to tackle compassionate fatigue in an effective manner, which can improve their professional quality of the nurses.