Assessing Burnout in Portuguese Health Care Workers who Care for the Dying: Validity and Reliability of a Burnout Scale Using Exploratory Factor Analysis

Aims: The aim of this study was to develop an effective instrument to measure levels of burnout in Health Care Workers (HCWs) who care for dying patients and confirm the validity and reliability of the scale. The Burnout scale for workers who care for dying patients was created in 2005, by Gouveia Melo, using items from the Maslach Burnout Inventory (Human Services Survey) (Maslach, Jackson, & Leiter, 1997), the Burnout Test (Service Fields) (Jerabek, 2001) and items specifically designed for burnout in end-of-life care. Method: The scale was validated with 280 HCWs working in oncology hospitals and in community home care in different parts of the country. The psychometric methods used were exploratory factor analysis using principal components analysis (PCA), Cronbach’s α coefficients, and intra-class correlation coefficients. Results: The initial 40 items were submitted to analysis for suitability of the data and 38 items were chosen for PCA. Results showed 3 main components with 36 items explaining a total of 34.29% of the variance. These factors were emotional exhaustion (15 items), professional fulfillment (14 items) and depersonalization (7 items). Cronbach’s α coefficients were .86 for emotional exhaustion, .83 for professional fulfillment and .63 for depersonalization. Pearson bivariate correlations were performed on the 150 participants, with an interval of 4 months for test-retest purposes with intra-class correlations from .55 to .59 in each domain. Convergent and divergent validation showed significant correlations. Conclusions: The validity and reliability of this scale was established, enabling it to be used within the Portuguese population.