Nurses' experiences of compassion when giving palliative care at home

Abstract

Background: Compassion is seen as a core professional value in nursing and as essential in the effort of relieving suffering and promoting well-being in palliative care patients. Despite the advances in modern healthcare systems, there is a growing clinical and scientific concern that the value of compassion in palliative care is being less emphasised.

Objective: This study aimed to explore nurses' experiences of compassion when caring for palliative patients in home nursing care.

Design and participants: A secondary qualitative analysis inspired by hermeneutic circling was performed on narrative interviews with 10 registered nurses recruited from municipal home nursing care facilities in Mid-Norway.

Ethical considerations: The Norwegian Social Science Data Services granted permission for the study (No. 34299) and the re-use of the data.

Findings: The compassionate experience was illuminated by one overarching theme: valuing caring interactions as positive, negative or neutral, which entailed three themes: (1) perceiving the patient's plea, (2) interpreting feelings and (3) reasoning about accountability and action, with subsequent subthemes.

Discussion: In contrast to most studies on compassion, our results highlight that a lack of compassion entails experiences of both negative and neutral content.

Conclusion: The phenomenon of neutral caring interactions and lack of compassion demands further explorations from both a patient - and a nurse perspective.

Keywords: Compassion; home nursing care; palliative care; quality of interaction; secondary qualitative analysis.