Concerning the implications of Burnout Syndrome (BS) upon general health condition of health professionals, with subsequent diminution of their performance, the aim of our study is to evaluate the general aspects of BS within two groups of nurses from two clinical departments in risk for developing the syndrome - psychiatric and infectious diseases.

In order to fulfil our aims we selected two samples of nurses recruited among psychiatric and infectious diseases departments. All subjects were evaluated with a Social-Demographic Questionnaire, the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), the 36-Item Short-Form Health Survey of Medical Outcomes Study (SF-36) and the Symptom-Check-List-90-Revised (SCL-90). Mann-Whitney non-parametric test was chose for statistical comparative purposes.

Concerning the results obtained we found significant statistical differences between the groups. Nurses from the infectious diseases department presented worse results.

According to the literature this results suggest that we can describe BS using the general disease model where stress, vulnerability and protective factors have an important effect in the pathogenic mechanisms.

Psychopathology is connected with burnout and seems to be a risk factor to the syndrome. On the other hand, the presence of previous general psychopathology is a vulnerability factor. We think that the possible orthogonal profile of these dimensions deserves further studies.