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Healthcare personnel may perceive troubled conscience when feeling inadequate and powerless. It is important to further explore healthcare personnel's descriptions of situations in daily work, which generate troubled conscience to increase the awareness of such situations. This study aimed to describe health care personnel's experiences of situations in municipal elderly care that generate troubled conscience. In this qualitative study, interviews were conducted with Registered and Enrolled nurses and nursing assistants (n = 20) working in municipal elderly care. The interviews were tape-recorded, transcribed verbatim and analysed with content analysis. Situations that generated troubled conscience was (i) Being caught between different demands, comprising being forced to prioritize between different residents' needs, being torn between residents'-/relatives'-/and co-workers' needs and expectations' and between work and private life, (ii) Being torn away from residents to other 'must do's', comprising stealing time from residents' to do housekeeping chore' and to 'obey' rules and recommendations, (iii) Feeling unable to relieve suffering, comprising falling short when striving to help, lacking knowledge, advice and support and time to ease residents' suffering and finally, (iv) Being part of providing care that is or feels wrong, comprising providing poor care and/or witnessing co-workers providing poor care, and being forced to give care that feels wrong. These findings identify important factors that generate stress of conscience (stress caused by troubled conscience), including difficulties with balancing priorities and following rules and recommendations that seem contrary to best care, and the need for interdisciplinary teamwork. Findings point to that sharing what conscience tells in the work team opens up possibilities for healthcare personnel to constructively deal with troubled conscience. Intervention studies are needed to explore whether such measures contribute to relieve the burden of troubled conscience and increase possibilities to provide high quality care.

Stress-related illnesses, such as burnout, have increased over the last decade, but not everyone at the same workplace develops burnout, suggesting that individual factors may contribute to this phenomenon. The aim of this study was to describe patterns of personality traits among two groups of health-care personnel from the same workplaces, one group on sick leave due to medically-assessed burnout, and one group with no indication of burnout, respectively. Fourteen psychiatric- (n = 7) and elderly (n = 7)-care units, located in one specific area in a municipality in northern Sweden, participated in this questionnaire-based study. The participants (n = 40), on sick leave due to medically-assessed burnout (n = 20), and those with no indication of burnout (n = 20), respectively, completed Cattell's 16 Personality Factors Questionnaire between February and December 2004. Conventional statistical methods and partial least square regression were used to analyze data. The results showed that the burnout group had lower scores regarding emotional stability and higher scores regarding anxiety than the non-burnout group, but the results also showed a wide variation of personality traits within groups. The most important indicators for belonging to the burnout group were 'openness to changes' and 'anxiety', and for belonging to the non-burnout group, 'emotional stability', 'liveliness', 'privateness' (i.e. forthright or discreet), and 'tension'. The result indicates complex interactions between personality traits and the context in which the individual lives. It seems to be important to increase our awareness of when personality traits may constitute opportunities versus risks in dealing with one's existing circumstances.