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

Emotional Labour, Mental Labour, Self-efficacy and Potential Influencing Factors of Hospice Care Nurses During COVID-19: A Mixed-method Study

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.

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.