Structural and Organizational Dimensions of Compassion Fatigue in Pediatric Oncology Nursing: A Qualitative Study

Pediatric oncology nursing is among the highest-intensity care specialties, exposing nurses to repeated child death and sustained emotional investment in family relationships. This occupational burden is a recognized psychosocial risk factor and a driver of compassion fatigue, burnout, and reported intention to leave, yet the organizational and educational determinants of this risk remain poorly captured by existing assessment approaches. This study investigated the lived experiences of nurses caring for terminally ill children in a pediatric onco-hematology unit and hospice ward in central Italy (N = 15), using a qualitative descriptive design, informed by a phenomenological sensibility to lived experience, supported by computer-assisted textual analysis. Structured face-to-face interviews were analyzed through thematic content analysis with stepwise replication, while quantitative textual analysis was performed using T-Lab software to map co-occurrence patterns among key lemmas, providing a frequency-based, semantically grounded picture of nurses’ representations of occupational risk. Seven themes emerged, including quality of nursing care, parental relationships, coping with a child’s death, and impact on personal and professional life. Findings showed that reported intention to leave was associated, in participants’ accounts, with absent psychological debriefing, cumulative emotional burden, inadequate end-of-life training, and a near-total absence of organizational vocabulary for peer-level support—a gap directly visible in the co-occurrence structure of nurses’ language. As a secondary aim, by combining qualitative depth with complementary lexical analysis of thematic patterns, this study also offers a methodological example of how psychosocial risk in high-intensity care settings can be assessed and translated into actionable indicators for organizational climate and workforce well-being. The findings inform concrete prevention strategies and policy recommendations for nursing education and occupational health, consistent with this Special Issue’s focus on methodological innovation for psychosocial risk assessment and public health policy design.