Determining the effect of compassion fatigue level on clinical decision making skills in pediatric nurses

The study was carried out descriptively, with 130 pediatric nurses in order to determine the effect of the level of compassion fatigue of pediatric nurses on their clinical decision making skills. The data were collected using the "Sociodemographic and Occupational Information Form", "Compassion Fatigue Scale (CFS)" and "Clinical Decision Making Scale in Nursing (CDMNS)". In the evaluation, number, percentage, mean, Mann Whitney-U, Kruskal Wallis, Post-Hoc Multiple Comparison and Spearman correlation tests were used. The majority of the nurses are under 30 years old (66.92%) and female (93.84%) and 42.30% are married. The income level of 42.30% of the nurses is less than the expenditure, 66.15% of them have no children. 76.15% of the nurses chose their profession voluntarily, 61.53% of them get satisfaction from their profession, 67.69% of them consider changing their profession. The mean score of the nurses is 4.03±0.44, and the mean score of CDMNS is 145.67±14.90. There is a significant difference in the mean scores of the CFS-Conscious Awareness sub-dimension of nurses according to marital status, number of children, income level, working type, working time in the unit and profession, and weekly working time (p<0.05). There is a significant difference in the mean scores of the CDMNS-Exploring Options and Ideas sub-dimension of nurses according to age, marital status, number of children and weekly working time (p<0.05). There is a significant difference in the mean scores of the nurses' CDMNS-Result Evaluation sub-dimension according to the weekly working time (p<0.05). There is a significant difference in the mean scores of CDMNS-Researching Knowledge and Impartially Adopting New Knowledge sub-dimension according to the desire to change profession (p<0.05). A moderate negative correlation was found between compassion fatigue and clinical decision making skills. It can be recommended to provide trainings and to implement nurses empowerment programs to reduce compassion fatigue and increase clinical decision-making skills. Keywords: Effect, clinical decision making, compassion fatigue, pediatric nursing