Overview:
Secondary Traumatic Stress (STS) is a mental illness of caregivers, including professional and student midwives, as they are often exposed to the physically and mentally traumatic situations of their clients, resulting in them experiencing a series of symptoms, predominantly a decrease in compassion.

Aims and Objectives:
To study this syndrome in a sample of professional and student midwives in Greece and to investigate its possible association with sociodemographic characteristics as well as with employment status.

Method:
238 participants completed the Compassion fatigue/satisfaction self-test and demographic information questionnaires within a period of 4 months from the approval of the research by the ethics committee. The anonymous data were processed by the statistical program SPSS and the statistical significance level was set at 0.05.

Results:
The average age of the sample was 33.8 years, the majority were Greeks, working in the public sector, with up to 5 years of work experience and did not hold a position of responsibility. In the sample, the average STS tended towards high levels, while the "compassion satisfaction" tended towards moderate. For compassion fatigue syndrome there is correlation with marital status (p = 0.055), for compassion satisfaction there is an association with age (p = 0.05). For STS, students and younger ages, primary care workers and those with higher positions of responsibility and academic qualifications were more likely to develop it in our sample. For Compassion Satisfaction, professionals were more likely to be in lower positions of responsibility and with fewer academic qualifications but with more work experience.

Conclusion:
STS is a condition that can affect the mental and physical health of Midwives already since their student lives and indirectly be an inhibiting factor in the provision of quality care to couples.