Compassion fatigue has been considered the main threat to health professional's mental health. It is a syndrome that leads to emotional and physical exhaustion due to the empathic cost to deal with the other's suffering. In Brazil this phenomenon is barely known. This article presents the ProQol-IV validation for Brazil, one of the instruments used to measure this phenomenon. For that two steps were taken: 1) semantic validation in which 37 health professionals responded and/or evaluated the questionnaire, 2) psychometric validation, which had 203 respondents. Factor analysis and test of consistency of the items was done. The result indicates that the Brazilian version held the psychometric properties and semantic properties of the original instrument.
compassion fatigue; health professionals; instrument
