Abstract
It has become apparent that medical doctors are struggling to cope with the demands of the medical industry with the death of an intern. It has been proven that the long working hours, for instance, some exceeding twenty hours, and the heavy workload is becoming demanding on the cognitive and emotional ability of doctors. As a result, doctors begin to experience compassion fatigue, which is a depletion of one's empathy as they experience burnout and overexposed to suffering. It begged the questions of, if a doctor is overloaded, and their compassion begins to decrease would it affect their ability to treat patients. Hence, this study sought out to establish if job demands and compassion fatigue impacted job performance. Scales from the Job Demands-Resource Questionnaire (JDRQ), Professional Quality of Life (ProQOL), and Individual Work Performance Questionnaire (IWPQ) were distributed to medical interns (N = 167) across South Africa. The results of the study indicated that there was a relationship between job demands and compassion fatigue, and both had a small negative relationship with job performance. It was also established that job demands, and compassion fatigue are poor, but significant predictors of job performance. Furthermore, gender appeared not to moderate this relationship. These findings were significant because they explored the interaction between the three variables which may provide behavioural practitioners, doctors and hospitals with more information to improve the work environment and behaviour of medical staff.
M.Com. (Industrial Psychology)