Evaluation of the Quality of Life of Anesthesiologists in the City of Recife

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: The practice of Anesthesiology is exhausting and stressful. The present study evaluated the quality of life of anesthesiologists working in the city of Recife, correlating the profile of the quality of life with the degree of satisfaction with their health, number of working days and weekly shifts, gender, and age group. METHODS: The WHOQOL-BREF questionnaire was used. Spearman's correlation and Student t test, ANOVA, and Scheffe test for variance were used, considering a p < 0.05 significant. RESULTS: Subjective analysis demonstrated that 44.6% of anesthesiologists have a negative or undefined perception about their quality of life. The degree of satisfaction with their health (r = 0.525; p = 0.01) and the excess of weekly working shifts (p = 0.03) had a significant influence on the results. Female anesthesiologists had significantly lower scores than males in the subjective evaluation of quality of life and in the psychological and social relationships domains. A significant difference was not observed among different age groups. The environmental domain had lower scores than the others in all parameters analyzed. CONCLUSIONS: Long working hours represented a negative factor in quality of life of all anesthesiologists in the city of Recife, and that of female anesthesiologists was significantly worse than males. Therefore, we concluded that reflection and actions are required to influence positively the health and quality of life of those professionals. Besides individual actions, institutional support is fundamentally important for the practice of anesthesiology and, to achieve positive changes, decisions should be based on scientific evidence.