Professional Self-Efficacy Among Psychotherapists Working with Cancer and Chronic Illness Patients

Abstract

Background: Professional self-efficacy kind of matters a lot for psychotherapists, it can influ-ence their clinical performance and how effective therapy feels, especially in chronic ill-ness and oncology care. At the same time though, when you look closer, not much research has really been done on professional self-efficacy among psychotherapists who work with people living with long-term illnesses. Objectives This study kind of aimed to look into how high professional self-efficacy levels were, and also how they relate with certain demo-graphic factors, among psychotherapists who work with people that have chronic illness-es. Method:  a cross-sectional descriptive, correlational approach was used with 290 psy-chotherapists who work in hospitals, oncology care centres, private clinics and sort of spe-cialized chronic illness environments. Results:  We saw a moderate-to-high degree of profes-sional self-efficacy in psychotherapists (M = 68.76 SD = 11.85). In fact, clinical competence (M = 18.94, SD = 3.57) along with communicative effectiveness (M = 14.03, SD = 3.13) turned out to be the top mean scores, like it was pretty clear. When it came to group com-parisons, there were meaningful differences based on age (p = .012), educational level (p = .021), years of experience (p = .003) and workplace setting (p = .044). On the other hand, gender didn’t show any significant differences (p > .05).  Structural equation modeling also looked reasonably good in terms of fit: CFI = .94, TLI = .92, RMSEA = .062. The pro-posed framework then accounted for about 57% of the variance in professional self-efficacy (R² = .57).. Conclusion:  Professional experience, educational level, and special-ized clinical settings were associated with higher professional self-efficacy among psy-chotherapists working with individuals with chronic illnesses. The findings support the importance of continuous professional training and clinical development in chronic illness care settings..