The CST program provides psycho-education classes based on evidenced-based literature, primarily Compassionate Mind Training, a psycho, which originates from Compassion Focused Therapy [16-18]. The authors conducted the pilot program at one hospital in Northern California. The nurse manager was brought in early into the program and help facilitate gathering participants for the program. Participation was voluntary. The authors conducted training and interviews with several groups of participants of 20-30 people, with an overall group total of 120. Nurses completed a 4-week program with every other week being an in-person 1.5 hour-long interactive lecture with discussions. Motivational interviewing techniques were used to elicit nurse feedback and views related to the lessons [19 20]. The weeks between the in-person meetings, the researchers contacted the nurses through email with prompts related to the previous lessons with opportunity for the nurses to respond with their reflections. The lessons focused on training in active and empathetic listening, the importance of mindfulness, the perspective of evolutionary neuroscience associated around threat responses, the role of believing in fixed or growth mindset with regards to our capacity in learning, the basics of compassion, the benefits of self-compassion, and the benefits of emotional intelligence. Nurses were provided continuing education credits for their participation in the program.
The program was evaluated using qualitative content analysis. Two researchers collected detailed notes capturing participants’ external responses along with any other observations that seemed relevant. The researchers compared field notes throughout the process, and they highlighted themes discovered while analyzing the data. Researchers crosschecked their findings to ensure inter-rater reliability.
Overall, the nurses perceived the CST to be incredibly useful. Preliminarily, there appear to be a few major themes that appeared. First, nurses felt more aware and able to control their current emotions. Some sub topics that highlight this are when nurses made comments about feeling empowered to have choices and knowing it to be okay to be angry or sad. Another theme discovered was nurses’ ability to work more effectively as teammates, building a solid comradery with colleagues. Specifically, nurses stated they had increased empathy, noticed they were more compassionate, felt their co-workers were being more helpful, which inspired them to be more helpful, and overall they felt more cohesive with their co-workers. A last theme highlighted how nurses’ felt they had better control over the shift handoff, which made their job easier, with fewer obstacles. For example, nurses made comments about how their shift starts better every day, they feel like they have more time while working, they were better prepared for the handoff, and they felt less pressure from their co-workers. The program was successful and engaging nurses to be more mindful and compassionate to their colleagues.