Psychodrama and handling of conflicts in professional groups: a positive experience with health operators and a reflection upon Psychodrama and individual differences

 An interesting formative experience was carried out in 2007 with the health operator team (doctors, hospital attendants, physiotherapists, speech therapists, assistants) of the Reparto di Riabilitazione – ULSS 15 Alta Padovana. We devised our approach as an in-process method aiming at developing and strengthening, in the single worker, self motivation and awareness about his personal role and, in the group, relational dynamics useful to improve communication quality, synergy and productive effectiveness. The theoretical-methodological frame we chose is Psychodrama, which permits to pick up re-elaborate motivations, perceptions, common and personal objectives as well as tensionsand conflicts raising within the group and the daily pressure coming from an activity dealing with suffering and death.
Through a Satisfaction Assessment Form, filled in by the participants, we were able to confirm our method’s fair suitability and its high educational quality.
By chance, it happened that the average number of the participants at the meetings was imposed by practical necessity instead of our own motivated choice. This allowed us to investigate an hypothesis about the effect of this number on the satisfaction and perceived effectiveness in Psychodrama groups. Even if the number of meetings (and measures) was too narrow to reach significativity (seven in all), we could come very close to it and state that the satisfaction judgment is strongly inclined to be high and shared within little groups (about 15 individuals), while with a larger number of participants it lowers and disperses heterogeneously.
A decrease in satisfaction with participants growing in number was easily expected because of method-linked reasons. We considered instead really significant the corresponding increase in judgment variability, which could point out important individual differences in reacting to Psychodrama techniques, showing themselves only in critical situations. We are going to go soon over them in our next works.
Keywords: Analytic Psychodrama; professional group training; groups in Healthcare Institutions

Bonafede Carolina
SIPSA Società Italiana di Psicodramma Analitico ~ Bologna ~ Italy

de Marco Mario
Azienda ULSS 15 Alta Padovana ~ Padova ~ Italy

Quartararo Marco
Università “Tor Vergata” ~ Roma ~ Italy