Moderating effect of resilience in the relationship between compassion fatigue and mental well-being among frontline health workers exposed to COVID-19 Patients.

Most studies on the impact of COVID-19 have centred on patients and the general population with less attention to the frontline health workers who are more vulnerable to diverse effects of the pandemic. This paper examined the moderating effect of resilience in the association between compassion fatigue and mental well-being of frontline health workers that are involved in the mental well-being of COVID-19 patients. A total of 112 (mean age = 39.58; SD = 9.68; Female = 62.5%) frontline health workers completed an online survey of compassion fatigue, resilience and mental well-being measures in a snowballing manner. Correlation analysis revealed that compassion fatigue negatively associated with mental well-being. Mediation analysis with hierarchical multiple regression showed a decremental effect of the interaction term on the relationship between compassion fatigue and mental well-being of frontline health workers at isolation centres (R2 = 0.040). Frontline health workers reported that attending to COVID-19 patients was challenging to them because of the experience of compassion fatigue which affected their mental wellbeing. This was dependent on their low level of resilience. Therefore, it was concluded that when resilience was low, compassion fatigue had decreased effect on the mental wellbeing of frontline health workers attending to COVID-19 patients. It is suggested that policy framework for alleviating compassion fatigue in frontline health workers be developed and executed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]