Workplace Well-Being and Burnout Syndrome in Clinical Psychologists: An Ethical and Educational Reflection from the Perspective of Human Rights in Colombia.

Abstract

Introduction: The mental health of workers has come to be considered, in public health and professional ethics, a topical issue, and more so if we consider activities with high emotional load care, such as clinical psychology. In this context, burnout syndrome is a work phenomenon which reflects the hypothesis of the relationship between the demands of professional practice and organizational conditions. The discussion article presented below is based on empirical evidence derived from a quantitative, descriptive, and cross-sectional study conducted with clinical psychologists (n = 15) under service contracts in the framework of a Colombian Southwestern neurorrehabilitation centre. The Maslach Burnout Inventory-Human Services Survey (MBI-HSS) was used for the population of the health sector in Colombia. The findings show that 73.3% of participants are at moderate risk for burnout syndrome and 26.7% have no signs of it, with heterogeneous levels of emotional exhaustion, low depersonalization, and high personal achievement. Consequently, in the light of the operational criterion, a critical reading from human rights, care ethics and higher education is proposed, based on the consideration that burnout is not an individual failure, a warning sign of structural tensions that must be met with institutional and training responses that promote decent work.