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Studies on physician burnout in Spain show a significant presence of the syndrome among our professionals. Some studies highlight the speciality of medical oncology as one of the most affected. The objective of this study was to evaluate the incidence of burnout syndrome among the group of medical oncologists affiliated to the Spanish Society of Medical Oncology (SEOM), as well as to assess the weight of sociodemographic variables, background and consequences involved in the process.An anonymous protocol was posted to medical oncologist members of the SEOM (n=795). This protocol comprised a scale of sociodemographic variables and three scales of the Medical Professional Burnout Questionnaire. In response we received 200 complete protocols and statistical analyses were conducted with the programme SPSS, version 14.0.The sample showed high burnout levels in the areas of exhaustion and loss of expectations, with perception of time pressure to conduct work and social deterioration perceived in the profession as the two background elements with the greatest weight to explain the syndrome. The health consequences (physical and emotional) for the phy - sician are clear. Initial results show that conducting research and lecturing tasks could be a protective factor against developing the syndrome.The results suggest the importance of developing prevention and intervention lines for medical oncology burnout. In this sense, issues such as work time management and motivational aspects related to research tasks could be worth considering.

One of the essential issues in nurses’ daily work is interaction with patients, patients’ families, and co-workers. However, in the Spanish academic programs for Nursing Schools, social interaction skills do not receive adequate attention and nurses often report communication problems. In order to diminish these difficulties and to train nursing staff to better manage interaction, an intensive counseling training program was designed and implemented in a General University Hospital. The main aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of a counseling training program and assessing the evolution of difficulties that professionals perceived in their work in three different periods: before the training, after the training, and at follow-up, 2 months after the program was delivered. According to the results, we can maintain the hypothesis that the counseling training program reduces perceived interaction difficulties in nursing staff. Consequently, we can expect a further improvement in the interaction performance with patients and their families after the training. These findings suggest that counseling training has to be taken into account to improve quality of care in health care providers, and it may also help to prevent professional burnout by increasing competence level at minimum personal cost.

Many health care professionals have to deal regularly with their patients' deaths and relatives' bereavement, but frequently they have not been trained in this area, and therefore the psychological cost is very high. The authors' principal aim in this work is to describe health care professionals' perceptions about death. A group of health care professionals who worked with children was compared with a group who worked with elderly people. Results showed that emotional aspects were perceived as more important than biomedical aspects in the death process. Between the groups, some differences were detected relating to the perception of the proximity of members' own deaths, and the authors could also observe that the death of a loved one was perceived as more important than their own death. These results should be taken into account to design training programs for health care professionals to minimize psychological costs and increase the quality of care.

A haemophilia-specific health-related quality-of-life questionnaire (named 'Hemofilia-QoL') was developed to assess quality-of-life in adults with haemophilia, and was psychometrically tested. Seventy-three interviews with haemophilia patients and health care professionals were used to generate the items included in the questionnaire, and expert ratings on the items formulated were used to screen them for potential omission. This was followed by psychometric testing in a sample of 35 patients. Preliminary psychometric testing of the revised questionnaire version, which contains 10 domains (physical health, physical role, joint damage, pain, treatment satisfaction, emotional role, mental health, social support), showed acceptable reliability (alpha = 0.94 for the Hemofilia-QoL total score) and validity, and this will be examined in a subsequent study with a larger patient sample.

There are many questions about the relationship between HIV-related symptoms and psychological distress, and how this relationship affects the immunological and clinical stage of illness. This article reviews the most recent research studies in this field, and encourages new research projects which will help in the management of physical and psychological symptoms associated with HIV infection.