Investigating the Role of Self-Compassion and Clinical Competencies in the Prediction of Nurse's Professional Quality of Life

Quality of professional life has complicated the relationship with the characteristics of the work environment, personal living environment, and exposure to primary and secondary trauma at the workplace. This study aimed at determining the role of self-compassion and clinical competence in the quality of nurse's professional life.
This study was descriptive and correlational. The study population of this study included all nurses at public hospitals of Cain (n = 114; 96 nurses and 18 health workers). Due to the small size of the study population, all members were considered as samples. In order to collect data, the Self-Compassion Scale (Neff, 2003), Clinical Competence Scale (Meretoja et al., 2004) and the Quality of Professional Life Questionnaire (Stam, 2010) were used. Multiple regression analysis was used to examine the research hypotheses.
Data analysis showed that adaptive clinical competency and self-compassion were positive predictors of satisfaction of compassionate component and in total explained 24% of the satisfaction of compassionate variance (R Square = 0.24). In addition, maladaptive self-compassion was a positive predictor of secondary traumatic stress and explained 12% of the observed variance in this component (R Square = 0.12). Furthermore, maladaptive self-compassion and clinical competency were positive and negative predictors of quality of life burnout component, respectively, and totally, explained 22% of burnout (R Square = 0.22).
Analysis of the findings showed the role of self-compassion and clinical competence in the quality of nurse's professional life and the importance of attention to competence and self-compassion and its components during the training of nursing staff in university classrooms, training, retraining and in-service training courses.