Salutogenic resource profiles and compassion fatigue among nurses: a latent profile analysis

Compassion fatigue is a major occupational health concern among nurses and may be influenced by the availability of personal and organizational resources. Guided by the salutogenic model, this study aimed to identify latent profiles of nurses based on sense of coherence, perceived organizational support, and mindfulness, and to examine differences in compassion fatigue across these profiles.

A total of 516 nurses were included in this study. Latent profile analysis was conducted using sense of coherence, perceived organizational support, and mindfulness as continuous profile indicators. Model selection was based on fit indices, entropy, profile size, parsimony, and theoretical interpretability. The Bolck-Croon-Hagenaars (BCH) method was used to compare compassion fatigue across the identified profiles while accounting for classification uncertainty. A manual BCH secondary model was further used to examine factors associated with compassion fatigue within each profile.

A two-profile solution was retained. The low-resource profile comprised 241 nurses (46.71%) and was characterised by below-average levels of sense of coherence, perceived organisational support, and mindfulness, whereas the high-resource profile comprised 275 nurses (53.29%) and showed above-average levels across all three indicators. Compassion fatigue was significantly higher in the low-resource profile than in the high-resource profile (estimated mean ± SE; 62.83 ± 1.70 vs. 30.68 ± 1.37; p < 0.001). In the profile-specific secondary analysis, working more than four night shifts per month was associated with higher compassion fatigue within the low-resource profile (B = 8.466, SE = 3.935, p = 0.031), whereas no demographic or work-related factors were significantly associated with compassion fatigue within the high-resource profile.

Nurses exhibited two distinct salutogenic resource profiles that were associated with markedly different levels of compassion fatigue. These findings highlight the potential value of considering combined patterns of personal and organisational resources when identifying nurses with different levels of vulnerability to compassion fatigue. Prospective studies are needed to evaluate whether resource-support strategies tailored to these profiles can reduce compassion fatigue.