Professional quality of life normative benchmarks.

OBJECTIVE: Those responsible for the care of trauma survivors can experience both beneficial and detrimental consequences resulting from their professional demands. Research has demonstrated that among professional caregivers, compassion satisfaction (CS), burnout (BO), and compassion fatigue (CF) are important factors contributing to professional quality of life. The current research aims to provide normative information regarding the factors contributing to professional quality of life among those who interact with survivors of trauma. The Professional Quality of Life (ProQOL) Scale is a widely used measure of CS, BO, and CF. The most recent iteration of the ProQOL manual provides normative data to assist in the interpretation of scores. However, a review of the literature reporting raw scores on the ProQOL suggests that mean scores and cutoff scores for the 25th and 75th percentiles may be misleading.

METHOD: A review of 30 studies (total sample size of 5,612) was conducted and normative values are presented.

RESULTS: The mean (standard deviation) level of CS, CF, and BO were 37.7 (6.5), 16.7 (5.7), and 22.8 (5.4), respectively.

CONCLUSIONS: Values gathered from the literature review tend to align well with one another and suggest that within a given sample, CS scores tend to be higher than BO scores, and BO scores tend to be slightly higher than CF scores. (PsycINFO Database Record