Introduction: Nurses in oncology are often in contact with patients who are in severe pain, distress, and approaching death. Although taking care for others encourages compassion satisfaction, with long-term professional involvement in the process of helping, nurses may feel distress or compassion fatigue. Compassion fatigue is a change in nurses’ behavior and emotions that results from exposure to a traumatic experience of others and from providing help to people experiencing a traumatic event. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to determine the frequency of compassion fatigue in nurses in oncology, its consequences, risk factors for its development and factors and ways that are effective in preventing the development of compassion fatigue. Method: In the diploma work we used a descriptive method with a systematic review. The selection of literature for analysis was carried out using the PRIZMA methodology. We searched databases and search engines: Chinal, Medline, PubMed and ScienceDirect. We used articles that were fully accessible freely or using the University of Ljubljana remote access for students. The collected literature has been published in English since 2010 and is available in full format. The keywords used were compassion fatigue AND oncology nurse, and compassion fatigue AND oncology nursing. We included 10 articles in the analysis. Results: Nurses often experience mild to moderate compassionate fatigue, which affects their physical and mental well-being as well as quality of work, patient safety, and job satisfaction. Mindfulness-based methods have been proven to be an effective way to reduce compassion fatigue. Discussion and conclusion: Nurses are often unaware of the existence of compassion fatigue and its impact on their health. Because they feel guilty about the feelings they are experiencing toward patients, they don’t talk about it. Nurses in oncology who already feel compassion fatigue and deal with it by suppressing their feelings can worsen the feeling of fatigue. Education about this phenomenon, simple interventions during working hours, communication and good, encouraging leadership play a key role in preventing compassionate fatigue in the workplace.
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