Self-perceived mental health in physicians of a public hospital in Asunción

Abstract

Physician mental health is a crucial and often underestimated issue. Physicians and residents face such normalized states of physical and mental exhaustion, with insufficient hours of rest and working in environments that do not always offer them the best spaces to provide quality care to their patients. All this, added to the mental state of physicians, can have an even more negative impact on their professional performance. For this reason, a descriptive, quantitative, non-experimental, cross-sectional study was conducted to evaluate the self-perceived mental health status of physicians in a public hospital in Asunción. We worked with a purposive sample of 50 participants from the specialties of pediatrics, obstetrics, and gynecology and residents of a public hospital in Asunción who were administered the 28-item version of the Goldberg General Health Self-Report Questionnaire (GHQ28). SPSS version 24 was used for statistical analysis of the data. The main findings suggest that 82% (f= 41) of those evaluated had anxiety and/or insomnia; 72% (f= 36) had symptoms of depression; 62% (f= 31) had somatic symptoms; and 90% (f= 45) of those examined showed important indicators of social dysfunction. All the above findings were statistically significant (p-value = 0.000c), suggesting that the high percentages of anxiety, insomnia, depression, somatization, and social dysfunction observed in the sample are unlikely to be due to chance or random fluctuation.