Assessment of mental health and depressive symptoms in hospital health workers: integrative review

Abstract

Introduction: Mental disorders affect a considerable number of professionals who occupy the most diverse jobs. However, when we consider health workers, it is customary to view this class as people who are not affected by these illnesses, as they are part of care-promoting environments. Objective: to evaluate mental health and depressive symptoms in healthcare workers in the hospital environment. Methodology: Integrative literature review research, guided by the following steps: construction of the research question; delimitation of inclusion and exclusion criteria; choice of databases; search and selection of studies; analysis and presentation of results. Results and Discussion: 570 studies were identified, after applying the language inclusion criteria, remaining 150 studies, and then reading the titles, in which 420 articles were excluded, as they were not related to the objective of this article. The abstracts of the 150 articles selected from the analysis of the titles were read and only those that met the inclusion criteria had their abstracts investigated. After that, the number of articles mentioned previously remained, which were read in full. The research comprised 10 articles. Conclusion: Therefore, according to the research findings, it is clear that work overload, lack of adequate professional numbers, lack of quality of life, family coexistence, leisure and personal care, completely affects the lives of professionals, thus affecting the their mental health and initiating depressive symptoms, thus increasing the number of suicides among health workers.