Work stress in professors of medical sciences at Central University of Ecuador. 2020. In defense of professors’ rights to a comprehensive education and a dignified life

Abstract

The university faculty professors, characters little known to the scientific community, specialize in producing valid results in the education process of students without an explicit work process, yet they are worn out in their work. The teaching staff is claiming their human rights in order to improve their labor conditions and health rights. The university teaching staff builds the foundation for graduates to become physicians, nurses, midwives, laboratorians and radiologists. The institutional framework, the academic management process, is crossed by vertical hierarchical models and relationships. This framework is one of the primary sources of teaching work stress. The question became: Did the work stress of university teachers of the Faculty of Medical Sciences of the Central University of Ecuador depend on supervision, work evaluation, shortages, relationships with students, improvements and institutional cooperation? The university staff gathered information from 138 professors (6% female) between 2019 and 2020. The test surveyed professors using the "Escala de Fuentes de Estrés en Profesores Universitarios" of the University Huelva Spain, with language adapted from its original design. The professors were studied in order to discover the primary sources of stress. The variables were handled as semiquantitative, using scale summations and averages; 95% confidence intervals and simple correlations were calculated in order to establish the sources of stress. The results demonstrated a 44.6% rate in general stress, where worry of stress ranked the most prominent response to the study. The vast majority of those surveyed related to the hierarchical characteristics of the educational organization, the hierarchical relationship of the work process and the implementation of unconsulted changes.