A study on COVID-19-related stigmatization, quality of professional life and professional identity in a sample of HCWs in Italy

BACKGROUND AND AIM: Perceived COVID-19-related stigmatizations have a strong impact on healthcare workers’ wellbeing and quality of professional life, decreasing satisfaction and increasing fatigue. This work aims at investigating the role of professional identification in moderating the impact of COVID-19-related stigma on the quality of professional life in a sample of healthcare professionals working in hospital settings. METHODS: A cross-sectional design in which a web-based questionnaire was sent to professionals was used to collect answers from 174 participants, most of whom were women and nurses. RESULTS: Perceived stigma was negatively related to compassion satisfaction and positively related to an increase in both burnout and secondary traumatic stress. Professional identification had a positive correlation with satisfaction and a negative correlation with burnout, but this was not directly related to secondary traumatic stress. Importantly, stigma and identification interacted so that stigma decreased compassion satisfaction only when identification was low, and increased secondary traumatic stress only when identification was high. No interaction effect appeared for burnout. CONCLUSIONS: Experience of stigmatization has the potential to decrease the quality of professional life in healthcare professionals. Professional identification seems to help professionals in maintaining a higher level of compassion satisfaction and in limiting burnout. However, professional identification seems also to be associated with vicarious trauma experienced following stigma. (www.actabiomedica.it)