Compassion Fatigue and Burnout Among Health Care Professionals: Protocol for a Scoping Review

Compassion fatigue and burnout among health care professionals are growing concerns, impacting the well-being of both providers and patients.

This scoping review aims to map existing evidence on the levels of compassion satisfaction, burnout, and secondary traumatic stress among health care professionals while identifying factors influencing their professional quality of life.

We will conduct a scoping review using established methods proposed by Arksey and O'Malley and Levac et al, also incorporating the recommendations of the Joanna Briggs Institute for scoping reviews and reporting guidelines. EMBASE, ERIC, PubMed, Science Direct, Scopus, and Web of Science will be searched from March 2019 to March 2024, with an update closer to the time of manuscript submission. Gray literature sources will also be searched. Publications that contain primary studies, systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and clinical guidelines addressing compassion fatigue and burnout prevention in health care professionals will be selected for inclusion. Extracted data items will include study characteristics, interventions for the prevention of compassion fatigue and burnout, measures of compassion satisfaction, burnout, and secondary traumatic stress, as well as the quality of reporting and methodology.

A narrative synthesis with summary tables will be used to describe our findings. The review is expected to be completed by December 2025, and the search strategy has been developed and pilot-tested.

Our findings will help identify gaps in the literature with respect to compassion fatigue and burnout prevention strategies for health care professionals. This review will provide a comprehensive overview of current research, informing future interventions and policies aimed at improving health care professionals' well-being and job satisfaction.

Open Science Framework r83cu; https://osf.io/r83cu.

PRR1-10.2196/66360.