Determination of compassion fatigue and anger levels in nurses working in the COVID-19 clinic

This study was conducted in a descriptive and relationship-seeking manner to determine the compassion fatigue and anger levels of nurses working in the COVID-19 clinic. The sample of the research consisted of 227 nurses working in the COVID-19 clinics of hospitals in Konya province and who agreed to participate in the research. To collect the data, the Demographic Data Form created by the researcher, the Quality of Life Compassion Fatigue Subscale for Employees (CFS) and the Trait Anger-Anger Expression Style Scale (STAS) were used. Skewness Kurtosis, Tukey Multiple Comparison Test and Pearson Correlation were used to analyze the data. The significance level was accepted as p<0,05. In our study, it was determined that 78% of the nurses were women, 53.6% were married, and 75.6% had not experienced the last six traumatic events. Nurses' average CFS score is 16.4±9.5, Trait Anger average score is 20.5 ± 5.7, Introverted Anger average score is 17.3±4.1, Extroverted Anger average score is 15.3±4.1, Anger Management score average was found to be 21.5±4.6. A statistically significant difference was found between the position in the unit, income levels, and experiencing a traumatic event in the last six months and CFS (p<0.05). A statistically significant difference was found between receiving psychological support and STAS (p<0.05). A statistically significant difference was also detected between CFS and STAS. It was determined that there was a moderate positive relationship between compassion fatigue and trait anger, introverted anger and compassion fatigue and trait anger, extroverted anger and compassion fatigue, trait anger and introverted anger. It was determined that there was a weak level of negative relationship between anger control and compassion fatigue, and a moderate negative relationship between trait anger and externalized anger. As a result, nurses working in the COVID-19 clinic found that there was a relationship between CFS and STAS, gender, income level, duty in the unit, change in family dynamics, experiencing a traumatic event in the last 6 months, compassion fatigue level, income level, change in family dynamics, receiving psychological support during the pandemic. It was determined that there was a significant relationship between trait anger, anger-in, anger-out and anger control score levels of the unit where he worked. Keywords: Anger, Compassion fatigue, COVID-19, Nurse.