Relationship among perceived organizational support, psychological resilience, and vicarious traumatization of clinical nurses under public health emergency conditions

Objective This study aims to explore the relationships among perceived organizational support, psychological resilience, and vicarious traumatization of clinical nurses during conditions of public health emergencies, providing a basis for psychological interventions for nurses in such events.

Methods From October to December 2020, a convenience sampling method was employed to select frontline clinical nurses participating in epidemic prevention and control from two top tertiary general hospitals in a city in Hubei Province. The Organizational Support Scale, the Brief Resilience Scale, and the Vicarious Trauma Questionnaire for Disaster Responders were used for the survey. AMOS 23.0 software was used to construct and validate the mediation hypothesis model of psychological resilience between perceived organizational support and vicarious traumatization, and the significance of the mediation effect was tested using the bias-corrected bootstrap method.

Results A total of 220 participants were surveyed, and 201 valid questionnaires were recovered with a recovery rate of 91.4%. The vicarious traumatization score of clinical nurses was (71.76 ±21.64), the perceived organizational support score was (50.54 ±11.38), and the psychological resilience score was (27.35 ±8.03) during public health emergencies. Perceived organizational support scores were positively correlated with psychological resilience scores (r = 0.539, P < 0.01), psychological resilience scores were negatively correlated with vicarious traumatization scores (r = -0.582, P < 0.01), and perceived organizational support scores were negatively correlated with vicarious traumatization scores (r = -0.429, P < 0.01). Psychological resilience partially mediated the relationship between perceived organizational support and vicarious traumatization, with a mediation effect value of -0.285, accounting for 65.2% of the total effect.

Conclusions Clinical nurses experienced a certain degree of vicarious traumatization during public health emergencies. Nursing managers should actively prevent or mitigate vicarious traumatization by enhancing clinical nurses' perceived organizational support and psychological resilience.