Improving Retention Among Certified Nursing Assistants Through Compassion Fatigue Awareness and Self-Care Skills Education.

Retention of certified nursing assistants (CNAs) is an ongoing challenge for nursing homes. To combat the effects of providing complex care needs to residents, this quality improvement project explored a 90-minute evidence-based education program on compassion fatigue awareness and multiple self-care skill strategies for CNA retention. A single-group pre- and posttest design, mixed-methods approach. A preintervention demographic survey, a postexperience survey, and the ProQOL (Professional Quality of Life; Version 5) tool measured the CNAs' level of compassion satisfaction, burnout, and secondary traumatic stress at three time points: preintervention, 1 month postintervention, and 3 months postintervention. Forty-five CNAs participated. After 1 month, CNA retention increased by 43%, and at the end of the fourth month, the facility's retention rate was 100%. Forty-four percent of the full-time supplemental agency CNAs became full-time facility employees. The use of supplemental agency staff decreased to less than 5% of the total CNA hours worked. CNAs improved their compassion satisfaction, burnout, and secondary traumatic stress scores. This education program proved to be an effective, low-cost intervention. The quality improvement project highlighted the need for additional study on holistic interventions such as workplace education programs addressing compassion fatigue awareness and self-care skill strategies in this understudied group of formal caregivers.