The Paths of Clinical Nurse's Communication Ability With Angry Patients: A Fuzzy‐Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis

Workplace violence in healthcare is widespread, often triggered by communication breakdowns or emotional outbursts, posing substantial risks to medical staff. As frontline caregivers, nurses' communication ability with angry patients is crucial for conflict prevention and warrants urgent attention. To investigate the combinations of conditional variables that enhance clinical nurses' communication ability with angry patients. This study adopted a cross-sectional design with validated instruments and recruited 450 clinical nurses from two level hospitals in Henan Province, China. This study explored Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis to identify the configurational pathways that contribute to high levels of clinical nurses' communication ability with angry patients. The results indicate that years of nursing experience, stable employment relationship, perceived social mindfulness, moral sensitivity, and self-efficacy collectively shaped nurses' communication ability with angry patients. Five configurations were identified and condensed into three explanatory models that together explained 84.3% of high-level communication ability. Nurses' communication ability with angry patients arises from the combined effects of individual traits, organizational factors, and societal attitudes. Interventions and policies must target these multi-level configurations to ultimately mitigate and prevent hospital workplace violence.