Struktura roli zawodowej a syndrom wypalenia zawodowego lekarzy i pielęgniarek

Abstract

The article is devoted to a burnout effect among doctors and nurses. The aim of the research was to define the differences in the level of a burnout effect among doctors and nurses of different specialties taking into account different structures of a professional role. The research was composed of 309 people aged 24‑74 (mean being 40.02 and standard deviation 9.46) working a minimum of 2 years in a medical profession. The group consisted of 70 nurses and 329 doctors belonging to 6 different subgroups differentiated according to the structure of a professional role 35 surgical nurses, 35 neurological nurses, 66 resident doctors, 76 specialists, 65 hospice doctors and 32 dentists. The study was cross‑sectional in nature. In order to define the risk of a professional burnout, a Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) was used adapted by T. Pasikowski. On the basis of a statistical analysis it can be claimed that doctors are more burnt out than nurses within emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, however, in the case of personal achievements, the findings are not so clear‑ cut (a group of hospice doctors obtained much higher results than the remaining professional groups, whereas the remaining groups of doctors did not differ substantially from the group of nurses). The strongest symptoms of emotional exhaustion in the group under investigation were observed among specialists and residents and weakest among dentists. A worrying phenomenon is the fact that a group of strongly burnt out people constitute young residents (it concerns above all emotional exhaustion and depersonalization). An interesting finding is an observation that non‑surgical (neurological) nurses revealed a higher level of a professional burnout in comparison to surgical ones. The results obtained show that the structure of a professional role plays an important part in forming a professional burnout whereas the factors which seem to easily determine the risk of burnout in a given group (e.g. a big emotional overload with work, like in hospice doctors) can be less dangerous in the light of other resources related to a given work.