Millions of people work in professions in which they support people during times of sickness, difficulty and crisis: physicians, social service workers, psychologists, physiotherapists, emergency response staff, teachers, attorneys and many more. In so many cases, their jobs are deeply rewarding. However, the work can also be very stressful. To help with this, the Center for Victims of Torture offers the Professional Quality of Life (ProQOL), a complete set of tools to help professionals in the care sector, including those in front-line roles, understand the stress and symptoms they experience, along with tools for healthy coping so that they can sustain their critical work.
What is the ProQOL?
The ProQOL is an assessment tool that allows helpers – people in helping professions – to reflect on the ways their work is impacting them, both positively and negatively. Workers in these fields are frequently witness to illness and mental health challenges, as well as crisis situations like death and family separation. Supporting others through these difficulties can cause the helpers to suffer health issues of their own. Even though the work is rewarding, coping with these emotional challenges and second-hand trauma makes a difficult job harder.
The ProQOL assessment gives you scores that show your current levels of:
Compassion Satisfaction: The sense of pleasure and fulfillment derived from your work.
Compassion Fatigue: Two subcomponents of the negative impacts of your work:
–Burnout – Feeling emotionally drained, which can result after a period of sustained work-related stress.
–Secondary Traumatic Stress – Distress resulting from working with individuals who have experienced trauma.
How is the ProQOL Used?
Anyone who works as a helper can complete the ProQOL assessment, which contains 30 multiple-choice questions about how often you experience certain feelings in your work over a 30-day period. Then you can calculate your scores (or have our online tool do so automatically) to show your current levels of compassion satisfaction and fatigue.
Individuals can take the ProQOL at intervals to reflect on their wellbeing at work over time. The ProQOL can also be a good tool to implement team- or organization-wide for larger reflection and to consider staff wellbeing levels and potential for improved practices.
The ProQOL is also often used in research studies to assess the effectiveness of staff wellbeing interventions or to understand the impact of certain events. Every week, new studies are released that use or reference the ProQOL: searching “ProQOL” on Google Scholar gives you a quick sense of the broad variety of countries and topical areas in which the ProQOL is used – we see high numbers of citations!
There are two versions of the ProQOL available today: the ProQOL 5, which can be used by anyone who works as a helper, and the ProQOL-Health measure, a version of the tool designed especially for use with healthcare workers. ProQOL Health was developed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the extreme stress this placed on the health sector. It assesses helpers in two additional subscales: Perceived Support and Moral Injury.
Who Can Take the ProQOL?
Anyone can take the ProQOL, and it is free. The ProQOL is intended for people who help others in a professional context (whether paid or volunteer), and it has been a core tool for us at CVT because of our healing work with people who have survived torture. Our team of therapists, social workers, physiotherapists, trainers, nurses and more have benefitted from use of the tool, while helpers in professions like teaching, law and emergency or disaster response also find it beneficial.
At CVT, we are always looking for ways to support people who have survived torture; it’s important to us to help all our partners and colleagues working with vulnerable populations to sustain that critical work. For this reason, there is no fee to use the ProQOL. We hope that as more people take these steps to consider and bolster their resilience, it will maintain and strengthen beneficial impacts on people who have survived all manner of trauma and crises, around the world, far beyond our organization and direct partners.
The Broad Community of Helpers
At CVT we often find the ProQOL to be a useful tool not just for the “direct” helpers whom you might first think of (such as therapists or doctors), but also for those we might call “indirect” helpers: people in other professions still in the sector of care. This could include administrative staff, researchers and communications professionals, among others.
For example, I work in CVT’s Evaluation and Research department. While I sometimes get the chance to engage with our clients directly to speak about their experiences and insights, it is just as common that I might spend a day in spreadsheets, preparing and analyzing data. Sometimes, this data can be about distressing topics, such as the types of torture endured by our clients or the negative impacts this has had on their daily functioning.
Because I know this experience does not compare to what the client experienced, or their therapist’s job hearing stories like this day in and day out, in the past I often minimized my experience and tried to imagine that it couldn’t be having an impact on me. But, with reflection and discussion with others in similar types of positions, I think it is actually more valuable to acknowledge that while these experiences differ, all can be distressing and can have a negative impact on an individual, alongside the potential for a positive impact of experiencing compassion satisfaction and witnessing clients experiencing joy and recovery.
As part of this reflective journey, I have used the ProQOL tool and found it to apply quite smoothly to my “indirect” helping situation. Looking at questions in the tool like “I have happy thoughts and feelings about those I [help] and how I could help them,” it is easy for me to picture the people my work contributes to helping: CVT’s clients, their communities and torture survivors more broadly.
Overall, if your work is part of helping people who have undergone distressing or traumatic experiences, the ProQOL may be a useful tool and process for you.”
-Alyce Eaton, program evaluator for capacity development
Overall, if your work is part of helping people who have undergone distressing or traumatic experiences, the ProQOL may be a useful tool and process for you.
Another interesting fact about the ProQOL is that it is also a popular tool among veterinarians or other helpers of animals. While this wasn’t the audience for whom the ProQOL was created or statistically validated, we are pleased that this important audience finds the tool helpful.
ProQOL Around the World
The ProQOL is available in nearly 30 languages, and the ProQOL Health is available in 8 languages. While the ProQOL team here at CVT has limited resources for translation, we are pleased to have collaborated over the years with many fantastic volunteers who are willing to assist with high-quality translation of the ProQOL, including those who are using the ProQOL in their own work. Many healers around the world have kindly donate the translations they create. And new translations are always in the works.
We are very happy to know that thousands of people use the ProQOL around the world. In fact, on average, 185 people take the ProQOL or the ProQOL Health online every day. Since we started offering these automatically scored tools in February 2022, this has amounted to nearly 250,000 responses. This indicates to us that there are so many helpers out there, and that large numbers of them are seeking to reflect on both the positive and challenging aspects of helping. I will also note that our numbers do not include people who complete the ProQOL in other ways, such as on paper or as part of a separate training.
Acknowledgement and Thanks:
The ProQOL was originally developed by Dr. Beth Hudnall Stamm, building off work by and collaboration with Charles Figley. CVT is grateful to them and to other contributors to the ProQOL over the years, including CVT’s former director of evaluation and research, Dr. Craig Higson-Smith.
About The Author
Alyce Eaton
