DEVELOPMENT OF THE QUESTIONNAIRE AND ESTIMATION OF THE PARTICULARITIES OF OWN EXHAUSTION IN MEDICAL WORKERS UNDER COVID-19 PANDEMIC CONDITIONS. PILOT STUDY

Burnout syndrome is defined in the ICD-11. stated in section "273 – Problems related to the difficulty of organizing their own way of life", is a real scourge of the XXI century, especially for people who work within a communication-related field. This problem has gained particular importance under the influence of the coronavirus pandemic. However, the issues on development and specific manifestations of occupational stress among doctors of different specialties have not been systematically studied yet. Specialty scientific papers on the indicators that reflect the stress and burnout were consulted for the elaboration of the working tool (IPSSHM questionnaire - for diagnosing the professional stress syndrome in the healthcare workers) and selecting the testing methodology. A pilot study was conducted to assess the burnout syndrome as a complex systemic state of the professional activity of various medical specialists in the Republic of Moldova, depending on their psychophysiological characteristics. A questionnaire, which includes two parts (general and special), was developed. The general part of the questionnaire (with ten items) allowed to collect personal social, professional, and married data about the respondent, regarding age, biological gender, family situation, living environment, activity environment, medical specialty, place/work institution, work experience, and information about a part-time job. The unique part of the questionnaire represents a set of 131 items, which characterize the respondent through the prism of six distinctive structural blocks: emotional-sentimental, behavioral block, cognitive block, communicative block, individual-semantic block, and neurophysiological block. 38.3% of themedical workers tested (n=73) did not suffer from burnout, while 61.6% of them presented various signs of burnout. The specific characteristics of the professional exhaustion among healthcare workers were revealed depending on their specialty and work experience, as well as on their psychophysiological peculiarities. The most susceptible to stress factors were the healthcare workers with <10 years of working experience (77.1%). The constituent mental health blocks showed changes among different medical specialties under the influence of occupational exhaustion.The obtained results demonstrate the validity of the questionnaire and the possibility of its application identifying healthcare workers' burnout. A relationship between physician burnout, their behavioral type and level of emotional stability has been demonstrated.