Introduction: Empathy plays an important role for healthcare workers because it enables the development of trusting relationships and leads to greater satisfaction and less distress and anxiety among patients. It also contributes to accurate diagnoses and higher treatment success. Burnout occurs due to prolonged stress in the work environment. It leads to poor communication and patient dissatisfaction. Burned-out healthcare workers are exhausted, impatient, dissatisfied, and often suffer from physical health problems. Purpose: The purpose of this master thesis was to find out how two aspects of mental health at work, i.e., burnout (exhaustion and depersonalization) and professional fulfillment, relate to the four dimensions of empathic responsiveness (fantasy, empathic concern, perspective taking, and personal distress) in Slovenian physical therapists. Methods: In the master thesis, we first used a descriptive research method. In the empirical part, we used an online survey to collect data. To obtain data, we used two previously validated questionnaires translated into Slovenian language – a short form of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index and the Professional Fulfillment Index. We also gathered basic demographic information, such as gender, age, and length of service. A snowball sampling method was used. The participants were 210 physiotherapists, of which 27 were men and 183 were women. Results: Our findings show a high level of burnout in 53% of the participating physiotherapists, while 64% of them reported a high level of professional fulfillment. Women (x̄ = 2,80) reported higher levels of personal distress than men (x̄ = 2,45; d = 0,48), but there were no statistically significant gender differences in the other aspects of mental health at work and empathy. Years of service were weakly negatively associated with depersonalization (r = –0,15) and exhaustion (r = –0,15), fantasy (r = –0,17), empathic concern (r = –0,15), and personal distress (r = –0,16), and weakly positively associated with professional fulfillment (r = 0,15). Burnout was moderately positively associated with personal distress (r = 0,34). Depersonalization was weakly negatively related to empathic concern (r = –0,17) and weakly positively related to personal distress (r = 0,27). Professional fulfillment was highly negatively associated with burnout (r = –0,60), moderately negatively with exhaustion (r = –0,53) and depersonalization (r = –0,55), and weakly negatively associated with personal distress (r = –0,28). Discussion and conclusion: We can conclude that empathy and burnout are interrelated processes. Mental health at work is particularly associated with personal distress, which manifests itself as fear, anxiety, and distress in physiotherapists. Years of service have a protective role in burnout and professional fulfillment. Our research findings point to the need for interventions aimed at preventing and reducing burnout in Slovenian physiotherapists, which could consequently also reduce their distress in work situations involving empathy.
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