Espiritualidade, religiosidade e crenças pessoais entre profissionais da saúde em tempos de COVID-19

Abstract

COVID-19 spread rapidly throughout the world, impacting people's lives in different ways and intensity, especially health professionals who acted in direct confrontation with it. The practices of spirituality have been widely suggested as mechanisms of care and self-care in promoting physical and mental health. Spirituality, religiosity and personal beliefs were identified in the quality of life of health professionals who work on the front line of confronting COVID-19. This is a field, descriptive, transversal and quantitative research, carried out in the city of Vitória da Conquista, Bahia, Brazil, among health workers working in reference units for the care of patients with suspected or confirmed cases of COVID-19. A sampling plan was carried out through the selection of a simple random sample (AAS), based on the sample calculation for a finite population, with an estimated sample of 152 professionals. Socio-economic-demographic conditions were assessed by a specific questionnaire; spirituality, religiosity and personal beliefs, and their relationship with quality of life, was studied through the World Health Organization Quality of Life - Spirituality, Religouness and Personal Beliefs (WHOQOL-SRPB); general health conditions, with an emphasis on common mental disorders, were assessed using the General Health Questionnaire (QSG); questions related to quality of life were investigated by applying the 12-Item Short- Form Health Survey (SF-12) and; fear of COVID was measured by a questionnaire based on the Portuguese version of the COVID-19 Fear Scale (EMC-19). Data were collected during the period from November 2020 to March 2021, through structured questionnaires in electronic versions, through the digital platform of Google Forms and analyzed using the Statistical Package Social Science (SPSS®) software, version 25.0. Categorical and quantitative variables were evaluated in order to carry out descriptive analyses. After estimating the scales of spirituality, religiosity and personal beliefs; of common mental disorders; quality of life and; of fear of COVID using the simple additive method, correlations between WHOQOL-SRPB and these scales were estimated. Of the 152 selected professionals, 147 (96.71%) answered the questionnaires and 5 (3.28%) refused to participate. Among the 147 respondents, cases were selected in the SPSS software, and those who did not answer the valid questions of the instruments in question were discarded, resulting in a database with 111 professionals, with a response rate equivalent to 73.02%. An article was produced entitled: Spirituality among health professionals who work on the front line of confronting COVID- 19, in a municipality in the southwest of Bahia and its correlation with quality of life, mental disorders and fear of COVID. The results showed that spirituality practices act as a promoter of the quality of life of professionals who are in the front line of health services, in the care of patients affected by COVID-19, showing that spirituality is related to the lowest rate of common mental disorders and to a better quality of life.