Purpose: Nurses working in intensive care units are more likely to experience low compassion satisfaction andhigher levels of compassion fatigue. This study examined differences in pediatric nurses' compassion experiencesbased on admission unit acuity and identified clusters (i.e., groups) of pediatric nurses according to their compas￾sion experience profiles.Methods: A cross-sectional, comparative research design was adopted. Using convenience sampling, nursesworking in acute care pediatric units and Pediatric Intensive Care Units (PICUs) from two Jordanian hospitalswere invited to complete the Professional Quality of Life (ProQOL), which consists of the compassion satisfaction,burnout, and Secondary Traumatic Stress (STS) subscales. Independent-samples t-tests and hierarchical andk-means cluster analyses were conducted.Results: One hundred and forty-six nurses were recruited. The ProQOL subscale scores demonstrated moderatelevels of compassion satisfaction, burnout, and STS. No significant differences were observed among nurses,based on admission unit acuity, in the ProQOL subscales. However, the cluster analyses identified two clustersof nurses: one with higher compassion fatigue and another with lower compassion fatigue experiences.Conclusion: Our findings suggest that pediatric nurses could be classified into groups with higher or lower levelsof compassion fatigue. This resulting clustering of pediatric nurses, based on their compassion experience, seemsto be independent of their sociodemographic characteristics.Implications to practice: Compassion fatigue is evident among pediatric nurses in clinical settings with varying cli￾ent acuities. Routine screening and interventions for compassion fatigue are urgently needed to curb its negativeclinical and administrative effects.© 2026 Elsevier Inc. All rights are reserved, including those for text and data mining, AI training, and similar tech￾nologies.