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Paediatric nurses' experience with death: The effect of empathic tendency on their anxiety levels
Author(s) -
Polat Sevinç,
Küçük Alemdar Dilek,
Gürol Ayşe
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
international journal of nursing practice
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.62
H-Index - 55
eISSN - 1440-172X
pISSN - 1322-7114
DOI - 10.1111/ijn.12023
Subject(s) - anxiety , trait anxiety , intensive care unit , medicine , clinical psychology , empathy , death anxiety , intensive care , state trait anxiety inventory , trait , psychology , psychiatry , intensive care medicine , computer science , programming language
The purpose of this descriptive and analytic study is to investigate the effect on anxiety levels of nurses' empathic tendency after experiencing death of patients in the paediatric intensive care unit. No sampling method was used in this study, and all 58 nurses working in the paediatric intensive care unit that agreed to participate in the study were included. The score mean of E mpathic T endency S cale for nurses was 77.43 ± 4.55, their score mean of trait anxiety inventory was 39.82 ± 5.53 and their score mean of state anxiety inventory was 48.03 ± 6.80. This study concluded that nurses had a mild trait anxiety level under normal conditions and experienced moderate anxiety levels when faced with death. This study concluded that the empathic tendency of nurses working in the paediatric intensive care unit had no effect on their anxiety levels when faced with death; however, the anxiety level of nurses decreased as their empathic trends increased.