Mental health is behind specific pathologies about which little was known a few years ago, but which fortunately are being named, giving them the importance they deserve and placing them at the center of public debate. This is the case of ‘burnout’ or ‘burned worker syndrome’, which emerged strongly during the pandemic. The management of the covid among health professionals generated excessive stress as a result of exhaustion and wear and tear, the most obvious symptoms of which are the feeling of extreme fatigue, detachment from their professional work, difficulty concentrating and tachycardia when thinking about work.
María Isabel Soler Sánchez, professor of Psychology at the University of Murcia, is the principal investigator of the Erasmus+ BENDIt-EU project ‘Burnout education, normatives and digital tools for European universities’, funded by the European Union and coordinated by the University of Medicine and Pharmacy Carol Davila from Romania, in collaboration with Trakia University from Bulgaria, the University of Nicosia in Cyprus and Lusófana from Portugal.
This study tries precisely to shed light on the emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and low personal fulfillment that emergent stress can generate in healthcare work contexts. An endemic disease that spreads throughout the world, but in this case it was going to have as a field of study European students of health degrees.
«The pandemic showed that many professionals and students did not know how to manage the emotions of an extreme situation»
The research, which started in 2019, was born for the evaluation and prevention of academic burnout in the profession of Medicine. However, the work team did not take long to realize that the study could be extended to students of other health degrees encompassed in Health Sciences such as Psychology, Nursing or Physiotherapy, equally affected by this syndrome.
The academic ‘burnout’ on which the study focuses is defined as a feeling of exhaustion due to the high demands and academic demands, which causes students to develop negative attitudes and pessimistic feelings regarding tasks.
“The objective was to analyze and evaluate ‘burnout’ in students of these degrees to prevent suffering in the future when they have to practice their profession”, explains María Isabel Soler.
For her part, Belén Fernández Collado, co-director of the project, affirms that “the students of these degrees are usually very stressed throughout the degree, firstly because they need a high grade to enter, secondly because of the demands of the studies, and thirdly due to the fact that in many of them they have to combine practical and theoretical classes from the first year, including rotating shifts, something that in many cases can trigger this syndrome».
pocket handbook
The project was divided into three phases or areas of action. The first consisted of preparing a pocket manual, ‘pocket’, which includes practical information on what ‘burnout’ is, what it consists of, what its symptoms are and what preventive measures can be taken if we detect that we are suffering from this syndrome. And although the study is aimed at students, this manual is also valid for teachers and specialists in student counseling due to the knowledge included in it.
This manual, with all the recommendations it incorporates, is published ‘online’ in the five languages of the participating universities (Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Bulgarian and Greek), as well as in English.
The second action of this project focused on the design of a web page (www.bendit-eu.eu) so that any user –although the study focuses on university students– can assess their level of ‘burnout’. It works like a traffic light in which the orange color refers to recommendations about health, sports or nutrition, and the red directly links to the need to visit a specialist, although the page does not give any therapeutic guidelines in this regard. .
Training of trainers
The third phase of the project consists of urging universities around the world to train students in the prevention of ‘burnout’ through a training manual for trainers. “We carried out a pilot project in Portugal with students from all the universities and from those results came a training manual that can be shared by all the educational institutions that wish to do so,” says María Isabel Soler.
Curiously, only a few months after the investigation began, the covid-19 pandemic broke out, which prevented the research groups from the universities involved from being able to meet in person and had to do it online. However, at the same time, the pandemic was a perfect thermometer to measure the scope of ‘burnout’ in the health professions, since, without a doubt, the demand, workload and uncertainty of those days caused an explosion of cases. burnout syndrome, which also ended up affecting students.
“Those days were experienced as an epidemic of war, putting many professionals and students to the limit, with experiences that were difficult to manage if nobody had taught you to control emotions before,” says the UMU researcher, who confirms that “there were students seniors who, due to the lack of professionals, were working in hospitals and field hospitals and lived through very difficult moments and in which it is essential to have control over their emotions, since many doubts and uncertainty arise.
“Precisely the pandemic helped us see the need to make the most of this project to prepare students for what may come in the future,” confirms María Isabel Soler, who reaffirms the central idea of the research in terms of that “a health professional must not only know how to cure, but must also know how to manage the emotions of seeing a patient die on a day-to-day basis when what his profession seeks is to keep him alive”.
The research team from the University of Murcia involved in this successful project is made up of María Isabel Soler Sánchez (IP), Belén Fernández Collado (co-director), Mariano Meseguer de Pedro, Mariano García Izquierdo and Francisco González Díaz.
-
“There is a high prevalence of violent behavior in emergency and emergency services”
The University of Murcia also recently participated in the study ‘Violence of users towards health and non-health professionals in hospital emergency services’ in which the following researchers have collaborated: Juan Manuel Cánovas Pallarés, David Pina López, José Antonio Ruiz Hernández, Inmaculada Galián Muñoz, Manuel Pardo Ríos, Bartolomé Llor Esteban and Esteban Puente López.
Workplace violence is a Public Health problem that affects professionals in Hospital Emergency Services, being this environment where there is intense interaction with patient users and/or family members who require critical and/or special care. With this, the objective of this work was to evaluate the exposure to violence of the users perceived by the different health and non-health professionals of the Emergency Services belonging to eleven Spanish hospitals.
The design was an associative, cross-sectional strategy, resulting in a descriptive-comparative study, with a sample of 584 health and non-health professionals from eleven Spanish Hospital Emergency Services from eight Spanish autonomous communities. Nonparametric statistics were used for between-group comparisons, post-hoc analysis, and effect size calculation.
100% of those surveyed acknowledged having suffered workplace violence at least once in the last year. Specifically, in terms of non-physical violence, at least eight out of ten professionals were exposed (range 85.1%-100%). The group that perceived this violence the most was the administration, followed by nursing and medical health professionals, as well as nursing auxiliary care technicians.
three out of ten
On the other hand, manifestations of physical violence affected approximately three out of ten professionals (range 22.6%-29.5%), being more present in TCAE and followed by medical and nursing health professionals, as well as non-health professionals, orderlies and administration.
«Our study shows the high prevalence of violent behaviors of medium or low intensity in the Spanish Emergency and Emergency services. In addition, it allows us to delve into the different manifestations of violence received by the main professional groups of these services,” they say from the research group when making the final conclusions of the study.
Already in 2017, the doctoral thesis ‘Violence of users towards Mental Health professionals’, defended by the then student of the UMU María Sánchez Muñoz and directed by doctors José Antonio Ruiz Hernández and Bartolomé Llor Esteban, warned that 53% of Mental Health professionals are exposed annually to manifestations of physical violence, while more than 90% are exposed to non-physical violence (verbal and paraverbal).
#UMU #project #evaluates #prevents #burnout #health #students