Burnout em profissionais de saúde portugueses em cuidados paliativos

: revisão integrativa da literatura

Abstract

The challenges posed to health professionals working in palliative care are complex and demanding. The fact that these professionals are continually faced with suffering, with vulnerability, with the finitude of human life and with difficult ethical decisions, result in work contexts particularly demanding and stressful and can result in burnout. It is in this context that this work, which seeks to answer the following research question: What level of burnout in health professionals for palliative care? To address this concern, it proceeded to an integrative literature review, supported in studies with Portuguese health professionals working in palliative care. A survey was executed in the search engines of the Virtual Health Library, SciELO Portugal, Scientific Repository of the Portuguese Catholic University, Scientific Open Access Repository of Portugal and Google Scholar, a temporal lag between January-August 2015, based on the criteria Inclusion previously defined. Six studies met the inclusion criteria, having been established as a corpus sample. As an analytical synthesis of studies, it was inferred that health professionals, especially doctors and nurses in palliative care teams, show a low risk of burnout. While it is indisputable that these professionals are subject to risk factors for burnout, arising particularly from the repetitive contact with suffering and death, does not seem to be reflected in terms of burnout. But the percentage of health professionals in high and medium risk of burnout was seen as a concern.

Date of Award	7 Dec 2017
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Luís Sá (Supervisor)