Evaluation of Burnout Syndrome in senior students from a brazilian medical school

Abstract

Introduction: Medical students are increasingly susceptible to the development of mental health problems. An important issue that must be investigated during medical training is Burnout Syndrome. Symptoms typical of the syndrome, such as emotional exhaustion, are often not recognized with such, and may aggravate the picture already installed in the student. Objective: To evaluate the Burnout Syndrome occurrence in the final-year medical undergraduate students during their period of professional training. Patients and Methods: This is a cross-sectional, analytical study with a quantitative approach using a sociodemographic questionnaire and the Burnout Assessment Instrument “Maslach Burnout Inventory for students (MBI-SS)”, applied to the final-year medical undergraduate students in the city of Goiânia, Goiás, Brazil. A database was prepared, descriptive analyzes, Student’s t-test and analysis of variance (ANOVA) were performed. Results: Study sample was composed of 81 final-year medical undergraduate students, 42% male and 58% female. Age of the interviewed students ranged from 21 to 25 years (67.9%), 95.1% were single, 38.3% had low religious involvement, and 71.6% were engaged in regular physical activity. MBI-SS scores were: emotional exhaustion (4.21 ± 1.063), disbelief (3.02 ± 1.402), and personal satisfaction (4.28 ± 0.885). The analyzes showed that students who participated in scientific initiation had a better personal satisfaction (4.73 ± 0.78) and a lower score about disbelief (3.43 ± 1.27). Students who had experience of severe personal disease had a higher score on exhaustion (4.50 ± 0.71). Conclusion: The students did not present scores indicating the burnout syndrome occurrence. The scores were moderated in Emotional Exhaustion and Disbelief, but high in Personal Satisfaction. Thus, we could not characterize the syndrome in this group of students. Given the relevance of the presented results, it is important that the institutions of education turn their attention to the question of the prevalence of the Burnout Syndrome among medical students.