Contributions to the resilience study of ATI medical staff

• Main Author: Rodica Eugenia SÎRGHIE
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Amaltea Medical Publishing House 2017-09-01
• Series: Romanian Journal of Medical Practice
• Subjects: burnout syndrome; professional stress; resilience
• Online Access: https://rjmp.com.ro/articles/2017.3/RJMP_2017_3_Art-06.pdf
• ISSN: 1842-8258; 2069-6108

The stress represents an adaptation reaction of the human body to external or internal factors, with the tendency to restore its balance, the negative effects of the stress being related to the actions of catecholamine and cortisone, to the decline of the gamma interferon secretion and NK cells inhibition. The physical and mental/ emotional stress sustained during a professional activity (especially by medical staff) can lead to an overloading syndrome, named burnout syndrome, with 3 (three) phases: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and low personal fulfillment. Resilience represents the native resistance (or gained during the lifetime) of a person to physical or mental/emotional stress. The purpose of this research was to establish the effect of stress on the medical staff, especially ICU staff (Intensive Care Unit), and to study the resilience as protection against stress. Materials and methods. Using Maslach burnout questionnaire and the resilience scale – questionnaires applied to 300 subjects (ICU batch: 75 ICU physicians, 75 ICU nurses; the witness batch: 75 physicians of other specialities and 75 nurses of other specialities) from 11 hospitals in Bucharest, during the year 2015. Were used SPSS program, Pearson corelations, Anova test and the descriptive data analysis function for the information collected from the subjects. We could notice significant statistic differences between the four subcategories – as regarding the burnout scores for emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, professional fulfillment and resilience, with significance threshold less than 0,05. Conclusion. Resilience is lower in case of medical staff (physicians and nurses) with significant increases of emotional exhaustion scale and depersonalization scale of Maslach questionnaire; nurses are less affected by the difficulties of the activities within ICU sections comparing to ICU physicians regarding the professional stress degree, the results revealed that the less affected by the professional stress are the nurses of other specialities; resilience turned out to be a real buffer as regarding the professional stress; resident physicians (with low experience and a high stress vulnerability) are the most exposed to the harmful action of the burnout syndrome.