Emotional exhaustion in medical students of pediatry

Abstract

In this 21st century, people are exposed to demands that are excessive, so they will begin to feel anxiety and experience various symptoms, it is at this moment when we begin to talk about stress. Stress can have its origin in physical, social and threatening situations in the environment, therefore stress is the body's natural reaction to a challenge or demand. Currently, work activity generates harmful stressors that are triggers of work stress. One of the consequences that an individual can suffer from work stress is emotional exhaustion. Resident physicians are a group at high risk of presenting job stress and therefore emotional exhaustion because they are subjected to several of the triggering factors such as facing complex problems to solve in patients with variable degrees of responsibility and with a autonomy restricted to the different worker decision scales, having excessive workloads that often go beyond personal limits of ability to overcome them and that require too much concentration and dedication. Due to the aforementioned, the objective of the present work was to determine the level of emotional exhaustion of the Pediatric resident doctors of the Hospital of children Dr. Rodolfo Nieto Padron, to try to assess and detect the possible affected, and thus intervene with opportunity , both for the health of the doctors and for the quality of care for the child population they attend.  This research was of a descriptive, cross-sectional and prospective design, carried out in a population of 46 resident physicians, who agreed to answer the Maslach Burnout Inventory questionnaire. The results were analyzed with descriptive statistics. Of the 46 resident physicians studied, 47.8% (22) are female and 52.2% (24) male, with an average age of 26.9 years. On average, a pediatric resident works 15 hours a day. 47.8% of resident doctors present a high level of emotional exhaustion, finding 26.1% in the female gender and 22.7% in the male gender. The prevalence of emotional exhaustion in Pediatric residents is high, so there must be a timely implementation of programs for the prevention and treatment of work stress in institutions dedicated to medical care and the training of health professional resources.