Work-Related Stress in the Speech and Language Therapist Profession
Alfonso Cristaudo, Francesca Ferriolo, Lauro Mengheri
In Europe, work-related stress is in second place regarding occupational diseases. It thus becomes necessary to analyse this problem in-depth, taking into account the differences between various worker categories as well. The aims of this study are to observe stress levels in a sample of workers belonging to the professional category of speech and language therapists, to identify the factors which lead to more stress and in what way they affect their lives. To this purpose, a specific pre-validated questionnaire was given to this professional category, known as the Speech-Language Pathologist Stress Inventory (SLPSI). The sample comprises 329 male and female subjects, aged between 22 and 64. From the results, 45% of speech and language therapists have above average stress levels. The reasons of this are an excessive work load, a lack of time to adequately prepare and plan the work load, a lack of breaks during the working day, a feeling of not receiving an adequate wage for the work performed and not having any opportunity to improve one’s career. The most common stress manifestations are: irritability, stomach pain and the sensation of a slower or more accelerated heartbeat. In addition, there are strong correlations for high stress levels between subjects’ age and number of service years. Other variables are related to treating patients with severe disabilities, treating a high number of patients per day and being an employee for private centres or a freelancer.
Keywords
Occupational diseases, Work-related stress, Speech therapist, Stressor, Survey.
