Emotional Labor, Physical Labor and Mental Labor of Hospice Care Nurses: A Mixed-method Study

Nanjing University of Traditional Chinese Medicine200 enrolled

Overview

Hospice care is a nurse-led multidisciplinary team care that provides physical, mental, and social care to end-of-life patients. According to the WHO, the role of hospice nurses is addressing suffering involves taking care of issues beyond physical symptoms, to support patients and their caregivers. Different from other disease care, hospice nurses face end-of-life patients and their families. As the primary nursing contact of a dying family, hospice nurses have a more intense and complex emotional experience. In China, with the improvement of human rights protection awareness, the nurse-patient relationship is particularly important, and the social requirements for nursing workers are also getting higher and higher. In addition, hospice nurses not only provide physical and psychological care to patients, but also provide comprehensive care to families of end-of-life patients. It is not just the mental work of learning expertise and dealing with emergency situations, and the physical labor of caring for large numbers of patients; but also requires emotional labor that has rarely been recognized before. When facing end-of-life patients and their families, it is particularly important to express appropriate emotions and pay emotional labor.

Study Type

OBSERVATIONAL

Enrollment

200

Conditions

Hospitalism

Interventions

interview

The first phase included a qualitative study. We conducted a qualitative phenomenological method to better explicate and understand palliative care nurses' emotional labor experiences, as well as the dilemmas and solutions they encounter when physical, mental, and emotional labor intertwine at work. In the early stage, we compiled an interview outline by a written qualitative meta-analysis about the emotional labor, and added the contents in the interview outline according to the actual situation in the later interview process.

Eligibility

Sex: ALLMin age: 18 YearsMax age: 65 Years

Medical Language ↔ Plain English

Inclusion Criteria: * The inclusion criteria were nurses working as registered nurses for 6 months or more. Exclusion Criteria: * Nurses who were not directly involved in patient care (e.g., central sterile supply department nurses), and intern nurses were excluded.

Outcomes

Primary Outcomes

Chinese version scale of emotional labor

The ELS for nurses was developed by Hong and Kim (Hong \& Kim, 2018), which is a 16-item scale using a five-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (not at all) to 5 (very true), with a total score ranging from 16 to 80. Higher scores indicate higher levels of emotional labor.

Time frame: 1 day

Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale -21 (DASS-21)

Chinese version of DASS-21 has a total of 21 items and measures three negative emotional experiences of depression, anxiety and stress (Jiang et al., 2021).