Professional quality of life and burnout among medical physicists working in radiation oncology: The role of alexithymia and empathy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background and purposeThe professional quality of life of radiation oncology professionals can be influenced by different contributing factors, including personality traits. Alexithymia involves deficits in emotion processing and awareness. Empathy is the ability to understand another’s ‘state of mind/emotion’. We investigated professional quality of life, including burnout, in radiation oncology, exploring the role of alexithymia and empathy and targeting the population of medical physicists (MPs), since this professional category is usually underrepresented in surveys exploring professional well-being in radiation oncology and MPs may experience professional distress given the increasing complexity of multimodal cancer care.Material and methodsAn online survey was addressed to ESTRO members. Participants filled out three questionnaires to evaluate alexithymia, empathy and professional quality of life: a) Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20); b) Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI); c) Professional Quality of Life Scale (ProQoL). Professional quality of life as per ProQoL was considered as dependent variable. The three domains of the ProQoL, namely compassion satisfaction (CS), secondary traumatic stress (STS) and burnout were correlated with alexithymia (as per TAS-20) and empathy (as per IRI with three subcategories: empathic concern, perspective taking and personal distress) and demographic/professional characteristics as independent variables. Generalized linear modeling was used. Significant covariates on univariate linear regression analysis were included in the multivariate linear regression model.ResultsA total of 308 medical physicists completed all questionnaires. Alexithymia as per TAS-20 was correlated to decreased CS (β = −0.25, p < 0 0.001), increased likelihood for STS (β = 0.26, p < 0 0.001) and burnout (β = 0.47, p < 0 0.001). With respect to empathy, the ‘Empatic Concern’ subscale of the IRI was found to be a significant predictor for increased CS (β = 0.19, p = 0 0.001) and increased STS (β = 0.19, p < 0 0.001), without significant correlation with burnout. The individual’s perception of being valued by own’s supervisor was correlated to increased CS (β = 0.23, p < 0.001), and decreased burnout (β = −0.29, p < 0.001).ConclusionsAlexithymic personality trait increased the likelihood to develop burnout, with less professional satisfaction amongst MPs working in radiation oncology. Empathy results in higher professional fulfilment. These results may be used to benchmark preventing strategies, including peer support, debriefing sessions, leadership initiatives and work-load limitation strategies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".