Qualidade de vida de médicos e médicas UTI - Adulto, Uberlândia - Minas Gerais

Abstract

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines Quality of Life (QoL) as “[...] a person’s perception of their position in life in the context of the cultural and value systems in which they live and in relation to their goals, expectations and concerns.” Intensive care physicians are specialists in the intensive care of critically ill patients and are involved in all aspects of this care. This research is a cross-sectional observational study that evaluated the QoL of 44 physicians working in a public adult Intensive Care Unit (ICU) in Minas Gerais through quantitative research. The main objective of the research is to evaluate the QoL of physicians and also to outline their sociodemographic profile. Two questionnaires were used – the first assessed the independent variables of interest to the study: gender, age, marital status, specialty, years since graduation, workload, and number of employment relationships (Appendix A), and the second questionnaire used was the WHOQOL-bref (Attachment B). The participants were mostly men, cisgender (56.1%), with a mean age of 42.8 ± 8.46 years, white (68.3%), heterosexual (92.8%), married or in a stable relationship (70.7%) and belonging to economic class A (60.9%). The first article analyzed the differences or correlations in QoL based on the individual characteristics of intensive care physicians. It was shown that cisgender men tend to have higher scores than cisgender women for the physical, psychological, environmental, and general domains. Divorced/separated individuals scored lower than single and married/cohabiting individuals for all domains, and single individuals scored lower than married individuals. This highlights the complexity of the factors affecting the QoL of intensive care physicians in a public service, particularly the differences in gender and marital status, and the strong influence of socioeconomic status. The second article analyzed the differences or correlations between QoL and work characteristics of the studied population and found no strong correlations between specialty, location and number of employment contracts, length of training, weekly workload, and QoL of these professionals. It was thus shown that QoL can be maintained without changes depending on each individual's perspective. It is concluded that the results of this research may be useful in evaluating the QoL of healthcare professionals and in the search for factors that promote a better QoL not only for physicians working in ICUs but also for other healthcare professionals.