Abstract

BOGADO, Fatima; ACOSTA, Marta  and  TALINE-PIRES, Andressa. Burnout syndrome in health personnel in a respiratory diseases reference center. Itapúa-2020. Mem. Inst. Investig. Cienc. Salud [online]. 2023, vol.21, n.1, e21122312.  Epub Sep 12, 2023. ISSN 1812-9528.  https://doi.org/10.18004/mem.iics/1812-9528/2023.e21122312.

Burnout syndrome is defined as a response to prolonged stress at work, a psychological syndrome that arises from chronic tension. In Paraguay, the first infection by COVID-19 was confirmed on March 7, 2020, and consequently the Ministry of Public Health established isolation measures and preventive social distancing. The objective of this work was to estimate the prevalence of burnout syndrome in professionals from a reference hospital, in a frontier region of ​​Paraguay during April 2020. To quantify the degree of burnout of the staff, the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) questionnaire in Spanish was used, which explores the three dimensions of the syndrome. Burnout syndrome present great emotional fatigue, high depersonalization, and low personal fulfillment. In this study, a prevalence of 4.6% of burnout syndrome was found, of which 80% was female and aged 44 years or older. The value found in this study is low, but it is important to note that the research was carried out at the beginning of the pandemic, when there were still no active cases in the city. Regarding the signs of burnout, 64.8% reported levels of factors associated with the syndrome. Despite being a study carried out in months prior to the appearance of cases, more than half of those surveyed already had high levels in at least one of the signs associated with burnout syndrome. Our study reports a first situation on the psychological impact of the start of the pandemic on health professionals in a referral hospital in Paraguay.

Keywords : burnout syndrome; health personnel; mental health; COVID-19 pandemic; Itapúa; Paraguay.

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