Maria Lopez Aparicio, collaborator of the ATLANTES Program of the Institute for Culture and SocietyATLANTES Program, will investigate how gratitude affects the work of palliative care professionals and whether it can help to improve daily work practices. This nursing professional at Saint John Hospice (United Kingdom) has advanced during a seminar the details of her work, which will be directed by María Arantzamendi and Carlos Centeno, ATLANTES researchers.

"Palliative care professionals are more exposed to suffering - their own, their relatives', the patient's - and this can lead to fatigue and to them leaving their work", he said.

He believes that tokens of gratitude have a positive impact on the professional: "They help him, motivate him, contribute to reducing fatigue.... It's true that it's easier for us to pour ourselves out when a patient or family sample thanks us".

For the expert, it is important to know the meaning that expressions of gratitude have for healthcare workers, since it can be used to reinforce the positive, to be able to replicate it and to improve the systems of work.

"Dignity and humanization in those we care for and in the caregiver can reduce fatigue and gratitude can be a factor in combating it," he said. It could also be that these manifestations of gratitude are a motivation for the most difficult and complicated situations.

Do Spanish professionals receive tokens of gratitude?

When researching for this study, Lopez Aparicio has discovered that there is hardly any literature on this topic and that in Spain there is no systematic work published. Therefore, she will conduct surveys to analyze the reality of the expressions of gratitude received by palliative care professionals in this country.

The research has a quantitative and a qualitative part. It will begin with the first, by sending an online survey , with 16 closed questions and data sociodemographic, to all national palliative care services, which will allow us to know the reality of expressions of gratitude. From this, a qualitative interview will be conducted with professionals intentionally chosen to be a representative sample .

The researcher wants to know "if they receive manifestations of gratitude, by whom, at what time, what they do, what feelings they have and to tell a status in which they have received gratitude and what it means to them".

López Aparicio hopes that his results will make a contribution core topic in a context of increasing fatigue, that they will help to understand the role of gratitude and that "they will help us to continue doing our work in a dignified way".