Assessing Medical Professionals' Well-being

The Professional Quality of Life Scale V (ProQOL) developed by Stamm [20] was administered, which presents 30 items rated on a 1 (never) to 5 (very often) scale to obtain three measures: (a) compassion satisfaction (CS), or the pleasure derived from being able to do performing one’s job well; (b) burnout (BO), one of the elements of compassion fatigue, particularly associated with feelings of hopelessness and difficulties in dealing with work or in performing one’s job effectively; and (c) Secondary Traumatic Stress (STS), which is another component of compassion fatigue, consisting of work-related secondary exposure to extreme or traumatic stressful events. BO and STS are two aspects of compassion fatigue. The ProQoL thus reflects on positive (CS) and negative (BO, STS) aspects of medical practice. Participants were classified into low, average, and high groups for each subdomain based on the cut-off scores established in the original ProQoL [20] , as follows: lo-CS ≤44; 44< avg-CS <57; hi-CS ≥57; lo-BO ≤43; 43< avg-CS <56; hi-CS ≥56; lo-STS ≤42; 42< avg-CS <56; hi-CS ≥56.