Effectiveness of a staff resilience program in a pediatric intensive care unit

Background: Compassion fatigue (CF) and secondary traumatic stress (STS) is prevalent in intensive care nurses, especially in pediatric intensive care nurses (PICU). CF, which includes STS and burnout, leads to reduced employee engagement and nursing turnover. Purpose: The purpose of this project was to evaluate the impact of a staff resilience program on nursing turnover, employee engagement and compassion satisfaction among nurses in a PICU. Design and methods: A retrospective pre-test and post-test design was used to evaluate the impact of a staff resilience program on turnover, engagement, and Professional Quality of Life (ProQOL), which measured compassion satisfaction and compassion fatigue. Results: RN turnover was reduced and employee engagement was improved, although the differences were not statistically significant. The aggregate scores of the ProQOL indicated the RN's had low levels of CF with high levels of compassion satisfaction post implementation of the resilience program. Years of work experience was positively associated with compassion satisfaction and work engagement. Conclusions: Education regarding the prevention of CF and burnout coupled with interventions designed to promote resilience can be effective in reducing CF and in building compassion satisfaction. Practice implications: Doing an assessment of compassion fatigue and following up with the implementation of interventions to build staff resilience and promote psychological health can lead to positive outcomes, as demonstrated by the increase in work engagement and compassion satisfaction when burnout and CF decreased.