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Psicologia, Saúde & Doenças

Print version ISSN 1645-0086

Abstract

MONTEIRO, Bruna; QUEIROS, Cristina  and  MARQUES, António. Empathy and engagement as predictors of burnout among professional caregivers of elderly people. Psic., Saúde & Doenças [online]. 2014, vol.15, n.1, pp.2-11. ISSN 1645-0086.  https://doi.org/10.15309/14psd150102.

The ageing of population requires formal caregiving of the elderly, but this can elicit, among professional caregivers, burnout, empathy decreasing, and job demotivation, damaging caregiving. We aim to verify if empathy and engagement predict burnout. A sample of 78 formal caregivers of elderly participated, all women with low professional responsibility jobs, and working in homes care and day centres of the municipality of Castelo de Paiva, Aveiro. After formal institutional authorization, we applied Portuguese versions of JSPE (Hojat et al., 2001), UWES (Schaufeli & Bakker, 2003) and MBI (Maslach, Jackson, & Leiter, 1996). We found low values of burnout and high levels of engagement and empathy. Low empathy predicts 11% of emotional exhaustion and 18% of depersonalization, while high engagement predicts 18% of professional accomplishment. We concluded that job motivation seems to prevent burnout. However, it is important to investigate whether empathy prevents burnout or if burnout reduces empathy.

Keywords : Burnout; Engagement; Empathy; professional caregivers of elderly people; predictors.

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