Passionate healthcare workers in demanding intensive care units: its relationship with daily exhaustion, secondary traumatic stress, empathy, and self-compassion

This study focuses on Intensive Care Units (ICU) and aims to test whether daily job demands are related to daily emotional exhaustion and secondary traumatic stress (STS) after work through the experience of passion at work and whether personal resources in ICU, such as empathy and self-compassion, moderate these relationships. A diary study was designed to assess day-level job demands, passion, empathy, self-compassion at work; and day-level emotional exhaustion and STS after work. The sample was 97 healthcare workers from ICU from different Spanish hospitals being selected by the snowball technique. This sample was assessed 5 days x two moments per day through a diary questionnaire. The multilevel analysis showed a negative mediational effect of harmonious passion between daily job demands and both emotional exhaustion and STS. Also, in predicting emotional exhaustion, a moderator effect of empathy on harmonious passion was found, as well as a moderator effect of self-compassion on obsessive passion. In predicting STS, a direct positive effect was found in empathy. Our findings highlight the vocational work of these healthcare workers, considering job demands as challenging and enhancing their harmonious passion to overcome the drawbacks. Moreover, empathy revealed to have a negative effect whereas self-compassion the contrary. Thus, increase the awareness on these personal resources and how to train them could be considered as valuable preventative measures.