Religiosity and Spirituality of Resident Physicians and Implications for Clinical Practice—the SBRAMER Multicenter Study

• Autor(a) principal: Ana Paula Sena Lomba Vasconcelos
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Outros Autores: Alessandra Lamas Granero Lucchetti, Ana Paula Rodrigues Cavalcanti, Simone Regina da Silva Conde, Lídia Maria Gonçalves, Felipe Rodrigues do Nascimento, Ana Claúdia Santos Chazan, Rubens Lene Carvalho Tavares, Oscarina da Silva Ezequiel, Giancarlo Lucchetti
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFMG
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/1843/52987; https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1886-1621
• topic: Spirituality; Religion and medicine; Resident physicians; Medical education; Graduate students; Medical resident; Espiritualidade; Educação médica; Internato e Residência; Religião e Medicina

OBJECTIVES: To assess the attitudes, knowledge, and experiences of Brazilian resident physicians regarding religiosity/spirituality (R/S), factors associated with addressing this issue, and its influence on clinical practice.METHODS: We report results of the multicenter “Spirituality in Brazilian Medical Residents” (SBRAMER) study involving 7 Brazilian university centers. The Network forResearch Spirituality and Health (NERSH) scale (collecting sociodemographic data, opinions about theR/S-health interface, and respondents’ R/S characteristics) and the Duke Religion Index were self-administered.Logistic regression models were constructed to determine those factors associated with residents’ opinions on spir ituality in clinical practic. RESULTS: The sample comprised 879 resident physi cians (53.5% of total) from all years of residency with 71.6% from clinical specialties. In general, the residents considered themselves spiritual and religious, despite not regularly attending religious services. Most participants believed R/S had an important influence on patient health (75.2%) and that it was appropriate to discuss these beliefs in clinical encounters with patients (77.1%), although this was not done in routine clinical practice (14.4%). The main barriers to discussing R/S were maintaining professional neutrality (31.4%), concern about offending patients (29.1%), and insufficient time (26.2%).Factors including female gender, clinical specialty (e.g.,internal medicine, family medicine, psychiatry) as opposed to surgicalspecialty (e.g., surgery, obstetrics/gynecology, orthopedics), having had formal training on R/S. and higher levels of R/S were associated with greater discussion of and more positive opinions about R/S. CONCLUSION: Brazilian resident physicians held that religious and spiritual beliefs can influence health, and deemed it appropriate for physicians to discuss this issue. However, lack of training was one of the main obstacles to addressing R/S issues in clinical practice. Educators should draw on these data to conduct interventions and produce content on the subject in residency programs.