Abstract
Background: Compassion and holistic care are an expectation of the nursing profession often while working long hours in high acuity environments. Although patient health is an identified nursing priority, it often replaces the nurse’s own self-care needs. This lack of self-care has caused an increase in the number of nurses suffering from compassion fatigue and burnout, which may increase nurse turnover rates. Nurse turnover has been shown to have a negative impact on patient satisfaction and safety as well as the financial burden of the hospital to continuously train and replace nurses. Pediatric oncology nurses are at a particular high risk for compassion fatigue leading to burnout due to the stressful nature of the patient population for which they are caring.|Details of Innovation: Sample/Setting: Inpatient, 38 bed hematology/oncology/bone marrow transplant unit in a free-standing Midwestern pediatric hospital/ Full-time and Part-time RN’s working either day (43 nurses) or night (34 nurses) shift.|Methods: This project was a pre/post survey design utilizing the Pro-QoL-5 survey. The impact of mindful meditation and respite room use on compassion fatigue was evaluated with the Burnout and Secondary Traumatic Stress subscales that relates to compassion fatigue on the Pro-QoL-5 survey.|Results: 71% of nurses had a decrease in their post-survey compassion fatigue indicator scores suggesting mindful meditation may influence burnout and secondary traumatic stress. The biggest barriers reported to using the Respite Room were time/busy assignments (86%) and forgetting that it was available (14%).|Conclusion: The use of the Respite Room for meditation and yoga did decrease compassion fatigue and burnout scores. These results are consistent with the literature and support implementation of a Respite Room for pediatric hematology/oncology nurses on this unit.