The impact of Balint work on alexithymia, perceived stress, perceived social support and burnout among physicians working in palliative care: a longitudinal study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objectives: Physicians working with palliative patients have a substantial risk of emotional exhaustion because of their daily confrontation with suffering and death.Common concerns include alexithymia, high stress, low perceived social support and a greater burnout risk.This longitudinal study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of Balint training in preventing the development of these symptoms in these medical professionals.Material and Methods: The design of the study was longitudinal.A group of 69 physicians working with palliative patients from 5 county hospitals in Romania (33 men, 36 women) participated in the study.Out of them, 31 joined and systematically attended a local Balint group whereas the others did not participate in such a group, either during the study or previously.They were given, both at the beginning (2015) and at the end of the study (2017), 4 psychometric instruments assessing alexithymia (Bagby's Toronto Alexithymia Scale), perceived stress (Cohen and Williamson's Perceived Stress Scale), social support (Duke-UNC Functional Social Support Questionnaire) and burnout (Maslach Burnout Inventory).A split-plot ANOVA analysis was used for evaluating the significance of Balint groups participation, with gender and age considered as auxiliary variables.Results: In the study group, Balint training significantly improved the scores of global burnout (F(1, 64) = 25.104,p < 0.0001), 2 of its components (emotional exhaustion (F(1, 64) = 18.390, p < 0.0001) and depersonalization (F(1, 64) = 10.957,p < 0.002), alexithymia (F(1, 64) = 3.461, p < 0.0001) and perceived social support (F(1, 64) = 57.883,p < 0.0001), but not the scores of perceived stress and low personal accomplishment.Gender had an additional contribution in decreasing alexithymia (F(1, 64) = 7.436, p < 0.009) and increasing perceived social support (F(1, 64) = 15.426,p < 0.0001), with higher effects in men.Conclusions: This study points to the potential usefulness of Balint training in addressing alexithymia and burnout, and in improving perceived social support among physicians working with palliative patients.As the Balint method is easily understood and does not require special investments, it could represent a cost-effective instrument of addressing job-related psychological risks.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".