The Professional Quality of Life Scale – 5 (ProQOL)

The Professional Quality of Life Scale (ProQOL) is a 30 item self-report questionnaire designed to measure compassion fatigue, work satisfaction and burnout in helping professionals. Helping professionals are defined broadly, from those in health care settings, such as psychologists, nurses and doctors, to social service workers, teachers, police officers, firefighters or other first responders. It is useful for workers who perform emotional labour as well as professionals who are exposed to traumatic situations.

Professional Quality of Life is the quality one feels in relation to one’s work as a helper. Both the positive and negative aspects of doing one’s job influence ones professional quality of life. The ProQOL measures three aspects of professional quality of life:

  • Compassion Satisfaction (pleasure you derive from being able to do your work well)
  • Burnout (exhaustion, frustration, anger and depression related to work)
  • Secondary Traumatic Stress (feeling fear in relation to work‐related primary or secondary trauma)

The scale is particularly useful for professionals to self-monitor their satisfaction and as a prompt for self-care. In addition, service managers seeking to facilitate staff wellbeing can use the ProQOL to track professional quality of life over time to help inform workload, leave and support decisions.

The scale uses words such as [help], [helping] and [helper] to broadly capture the work of helping professionals. When introducing the scale to a client it may be worth noting that they can think of more applicable words as a substitute.

The Professional Quality of Life Scale – 5 questions

Developer

B. Hudnall Stamm, 2009-2012. Professional Quality of Life: Compassion Satisfaction and Fatigue Version 5 (ProQOL). www.proqol.org.

References

Stamm, B.H. (2010). The Concise ProQOL Manual, 2nd Ed. Pocatello, ID:
ProQOL.org.

Hegarty, D. & Buchanan, B. ( 2021, November 29). Psychologist Norms for the Professional Quality of Life Scale (ProQOL). https://novopsych.com.au/news/psychologist-norms-for-the-professional-quality-of-life-scale-proqol/