Escala de Sobrecarga de Luto Profissional (SLP): construção e validação

The practice of health professionals in the clinical setting can trigger several overloads that sometimes lead to staff burnout or compassion fatigue. However exposure to death and repeated losses may make a kind of suffering that we have designated overload of professional grief. Objective: Development and validation of a Scale of Overload Professional Grief (SLP) that seeks to assess the intensity of the overload of professional grief or “insulated grief” in healthcare workers exposed to frequent deaths. Method: A sample of 360 nurses (response rate of 70.6% of all nurses) from services of internal medicine, oncology, hematology and palliative care of five health institutions in the district of Lisbon. Results: Principal components factor analysis resulted in four multidimensional factors of grief: F1 – tormented confinement; F2 – emotional stress in care; F3 – nostalgic loss, F4 – misunderstood sharing. In addition to good internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha. 81), SLP showed good construct, convergent, discriminative validity. Conclusion: The SLP showed good psychometric characteristics considered to be useful to expand the possibilities of assessing the impact of losses on overload of health professionals, becoming a new tool available for the study of professional grief.