Navigating emotional labor in palliative care: constructing a typology of nurse strategies

To explore how palliative care nurses navigate emotional labor and to develop an empirically grounded typology of their dominant regulation patterns, interpreted through a medical anthropological lens. We conducted a descriptive qualitative study involving 16 nurses from palliative care units in two tertiary hospitals in southeastern China between January and June 2025. Semi-structured interviews were analyzed in the original Chinese through iterative thematic analysis incorporating inductive and theoretically sensitized coding, constant comparison, and typological analysis. Four “ideal types” were identified across two dimensions: degree of emotional engagement and primary source of regulation. The types were empathic immersion, professional boundary maintenance, instrumental regulation, and environment-contingent regulation. They represent dominant, context-sensitive patterns rather than fixed nurse categories; nurses could move between patterns as clinical and organizational conditions changed. The typology provides an empirically grounded conceptual account of variation in how palliative care nurses manage emotional demands. It highlights emotional labor as a relational, context-dependent practice and may inform context-sensitive organizational support, although validation in other settings is needed. This study explored nurses’ professional experiences and did not involve patients, service users, caregivers, or members of the public.