title: Nurses' comfort with touch and workplace well-being.
abstract: Touch is an essential part of caregiving and has been proved to be useful to reduce pain. Nevertheless, little attention has been paid to nurses' perceptions of touch. The aim of this article was to examine the relationship between nurses' feelings of comfort with touch and their well-being at work. A sample of 241 nurses attending a pain management training course completed a questionnaire, including the following measures: Comfort with Touch (CT) scale (task-oriented contact, touch promoting physical comfort, touch providing emotional containment), Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI; emotional exhaustion, cynicism), and Job Satisfaction. Results of structural equation models showed that touch providing emotional containment was the main predictor of emotional exhaustion. Emotional exhaustion, in turn, was positively related to cynicism and negatively related to job satisfaction. In addition, the direct path from touch providing emotional containment to cynicism was significant. Practical implications of the findings are discussed.
authors.affiliation: University of Verona, Italy monica.pedrazza@univr.it.
authors.forename: Monica
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Pedrazza
authors.affiliation: University of Verona, Italy.
authors.forename: Stefania
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Minuzzo
authors.affiliation: University of Trento, Italy.
authors.forename: Sabrina
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Berlanda
authors.affiliation: University of Verona, Italy.
authors.forename: Elena
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Trifiletti
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D002055:Burnout, Professional / Q000150:complications / Q000523:psychology; D000068376:Compassion Fatigue / Q000523:psychology; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009726:Nurses / Q000523:psychology*; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D019124:Therapeutic Touch / Q000523:psychology*; D017132:Workplace / Q000592:standards*
keywords: burnout; comfort with touch; job satisfaction; pain; physical touch