[Assessment of anesthesiologist's stress of working overnight using profile of mood states].
BACKGROUND
In recent years, workload for a doctor has been increasing, because hospital managers are trying to improve the efficiency of management. As a result, many doctors are expected to work harder. We studied how anesthesiologists are stressed by their work, especially on working overnight, using the Profile of Mood States(POMS).


METHODS
Thirty six anesthesiologists working in our hospital are studied. We asked them to answer POMS questionnaires three times at 8:00 before overnight work, 8:00 and 17:00 the following day.


RESULTS
Mean working time for overnight job is 32 +/- 4.3 hours and mean sleeping time is 3.0 +/- 1.3 hours (mean +/- SD). The Profile of Mood States has six subscores (depression, fatigue, vigor, confusion, tension/anxiety, and anger). After working overnight, fatigue and confusion scores were significantly increased and vigor scores were significantly decreased, compared with the sores at 8.00 before overnight work.


CONCLUSIONS
We studied anesthesiologist's stress of working overnight, using the Profile of Mood States. As a result, after overnight work, fatigue, confusion and vigor scores were significantly exacerbated. We speculate that the anesthesiologists are building up so much stress when they work overnight as on call.
Department of Anesthesiology, Fuculty of Medicine, Oita University, Oita.
Norihisa
N
Yasuda
Chihiro
C
Shingu
Hiroshi
H
Miyagawa
Masakazu
M
Mori
Takaaki
T
Kitano
Takayuki
T
Noguchi
D000328:Adult; D000339:Affect; D000776:Anesthesiology; D005221:Fatigue; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011581:Psychological Tests; D013315:Stress, Psychological / Q000175:diagnosis*; D014940:Work Schedule Tolerance