Perfectionism in the anesthesiological environment

Abstract

Abstract Background. Perfectionism today is understood as an individual's psychological conviction that the ideal can and should be achieved, and the imperfect result of work (physical, intellectual, etc.), in their opinion, has no right to exist. The purpose of the study: Our goal was to consider this psychological phenomenon in the community of anesthesiology interns in comparison with the indicators of practicing doctors, to investigate its negative and positive features, their prevalence and dynamics. Materials and methods. An anonymous survey of 92 medical interns and 124 participants of short-term trainings in the specialty "Anesthesiology" was conducted according to the M.M. Smith questionnaire. (2016). Results. Interns showed an average level of tendency towards perfectionism on all other scales, except for "other-oriented perfectionism" where the level of the indicator was low. Practitioners showed an average level of tendency towards perfectionism on the scales "self-worth contingencies", "concern over mistakes", and "doubts about actions", according to all other indicators, the level of tendency was low. Among medical interns, the distribution on a Big-Three Perfectionism Scale showed that the degree of their attachment to rigid, self-critical, and narcissistic types of perfectionism was at an average level, including general. Practitioners showed an average level of tendency only to the rigid type of perfectionism, as for the self-critical and narcissistic types, the level was low, as well as the general one, which except for the average tendency to rigid perfectionism can be assessed as hypoperfectionism. Conclusions. 1. Neither interns nor participants in training in the specialty "Anesthesiology" in general are supporters of hyper-perfectionism. 2. Intern doctors showed a rather high tendency to "concern over mistakes", which is explained by the fact that they are not yet specialists, but only learning. This can be assessed as constructive perfectionism. 3. Practitioners are prone to "self-oriented perfectionism", which involves high self-demand. This is explained by the specificity of the work of anesthesiologists (surgeons work in a team, an anesthesiologist - alone), who must first of all rely on themselves, and only then on the help of others. 4. Hypoperfectionism of the self-critical and narcissistic types in anesthesiologists with a certain length of work is associated with psychoprotective deviation of professional behavior, which excludes setting extremely high demands for the results of one's work, since the self-critical type implies a high probability of psycho-emotional burnout syndrome, and the narcissistic type sometimes leads to medical errors.