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.
This study aimed to explore nurses' experiences of compassion when caring for palliative patients in home nursing care.
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.
The Norwegian Social Science Data Services granted permission for the study (No. 34299) and the re-use of the data.
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.
In contrast to most studies on compassion, our results highlight that a lack of compassion entails experiences of both negative and neutral content.
The phenomenon of neutral caring interactions and lack of compassion demands further explorations from both a patient - and a nurse perspective.