The Professional Quality of Life for Healthcare Workers During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Turkey and the Influencing Factors

Objective: It is very important to ensure the professional quality of life of healthcare workers in combating the coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) outbreak. It is therefore necessary to determine what factors may lead to compassion satisfaction (CS), burnout (BO) and compassion fatigue (CF) in order to ensure the professional quality of life in healthcare workers, and to develop institutional and national strategies and policies to eliminate these factors. Therefore in this study, we aimed to determine the levels of CS, BO and CF among healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the influencing factors. Methods: A descriptive, descriptive-relational and cross-sectional study was conducted, using the Professional Quality of Life scale, with 796 Turkish healthcare workers after the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the study, the Professional Life Quality of healthcare workers was examined in three dimensions including CS, BO and CF. Results: The results indicated that while 77.8% of healthcare workers were above the mean CS level, 62.8% of them were below the mean BO level and 87.3% of them were below the mean CF level. Their title, department, professional working year and workmates’ diagnosis with COVID-19 were found to affect the CS, BO and CF of healthcare workers. Conclusion: We found that workers had good levels of CS and low levels of BO and CF during the study period. Therefore, we can say that the quality of work life is good. However, due to the increase in the number of cases, we recommend that the study be repeated in future, to continuously evaluate the psychological state of healthcare workers and, using the resulting comparisons, to implement the necessary arrangements timeously.