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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2010 Jul 1.
Published in final edited form as: Genet Med. 2009 Jul;11(7):527–535. doi: 10.1097/GIM.0b013e3181a6a1c2

Table 1.

Items in Distress Scale by Subscale (Responses to the question: “How distressing has this been for you”?)*

Collegial Distrust: (alpha = .82)
    1. Feeling like you can't trust colleagues to openly communicate with you
    2. Feeling unsupported by colleagues
    3. Restraining yourself from speaking openly because of fear of what colleagues will think
Personal Values Conflicts: (alpha = .81)
    4. Having difficulty reconciling your own faith with being a genetics professional
    5. Feeling the need to hide your own faith or spiritual beliefs from colleagues or patients
    6. Feeling ostracized by the genetics community because of your personal beliefs
    7. Feeling like your professionals stance/behavior is not consistent with your personal values
Compassion stress: (alpha = .79)
    8. Feeling grief for a patient who dies
    9. Wanting to be closer with patients
    10. Feeling profoundly sad about what a patient is going through
    11. Feeling helpless when a patient is suffering and there is no way to “fix” their emotional pain
    12. Getting emotional with or too close to a patient or family
Burden of Professional Responsibility: (alpha = .69)
    13. Feeling like you abandoned a patient
    14. Feeling responsible for adding to a patient's suffering
    15. Feeling like a patient's entire experience with genetics rests in your hands
    16. Feeling inadequate to help a patient who is making a difficult decision
Negative Patient Regard: (alpha = .72)
    17. Disliking a patient as person
    18. Feeling angry at patient
    19. Feeling ashamed at not being able to feel compassion for, or partner with a patient
Inauthenticity: (alpha = .63)
    20. Participating in the offering of medical interventions you consider to be harmful or futile
    21. Feeling conflicted about whether to disclose personal experiences to patients
    22. Feeling frustrated by not recommending a course of action to patients because of the professional emphasis on patient autonomy
    23. Feeling like you have withheld diagnostic or prognostic information from a patient
Concerns about informational bias: (alpha = .90)
    24. Worrying about whether you've been overly optimistic about the information you've given to patients
    25. Worrying about whether you've been overly pessimistic about the information you've given to patients
Patient Dread: (alpha = .68)
    26. Worrying that every patient encounter has the potential to be difficult or painful
    27. Feeling frustrated about unreasonable patient expectations
    28. Worrying that the decision a patient makes may come back to haunt you
*

All items were scored 1=Not at all 2=Somewhat 3=Moderately 4=A great deal