المستخلص: |
Working with children and adolescents is astress inducing task. It is more of a complex matter when those children suffer from a mental disability. Intellectual disabilities, of all kinds and degrees, impair communication and create psychological, emotional, and social issues for the affected group, their family, their society, and the institution providing care for them. The pedagogical staffs at the Psychological Centre for the Intellectually Disabled are in charge of the diagnosis, the care, and the treatment of such cases. Professionals are thus at risk of developing psychological distress. The term "compassion fatigue" has been coined to denote the excessive investment of feelings and emotions on a given case. The importance of this topic urged researching this phenomenon through asking the following questions: 1/ To what extent do the psycho pedagogical staff suffer from compassion fatigue? 2/ Are there any statistically significant differences in the level of compassion fatigue according to age, gender, educational, and social status? The validity of the hypotheses was verified by following the descriptive exploratory approach, and using the professional quality of life scale ProQOL5, which was applied to a sample of 30 members of the pedagogical staff working at the Psycho-pedagogical Centre for the intellectually disabled children. After statistical analysis of the study data, the results of the hypotheses presented as follows: 1) The level of compassion fatigue among the pedagogical staff of the intellectually disabled children is high. 2) There are no statistically significant differences in the level of compassion fatigue relating to age, gender, educational, and social status. The results of this study reveals the extent to which the staff suffers from compassion fatigue, which helps us to research more and contribute to finding strategies to prevent compassion fatigue through building programs for groups working in health care industry, and rehabilitation centres, as well as centres for the intellectually disabled, and people with special needs.
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