Introduction:

Currently, the reality of nursing professionals working in the health sector shows that quality of life in this field of work is changing rapidly due to the increased responsibilities inherent in the position, which can affect, positively or negatively, the quality of life of health professionals.

Objective:

To identify studies on quality of life carried out by nursing professionals working in different health areas.

Methods:

In this bibliographic review, the search engines of Lilacs-Bireme, SciELO, EBSCOhost and Web of Science were used to look up for the terms calidad de vida [quality of life], profesionales [professionals], trabajo [work], enfermera [nurse], enfermería [nursing]. The Boolean operators AND and OR were included. The consulted scientific journals were of indexed type, in the Spanish, English and Portuguese languages, from the period from 2016 to 2018. Fifteen articles were found that met the selection criteria.

Conclusions:

The "bad" professional quality of life was related to long working hours, lack of pecuniary acknowledgement for holiday and night shifts, poor social and interpersonal relationship. On the contrary, the "good" quality of life is mainly manifested in the satisfaction caused by exercising the profession, a fact linked to the well-being of the nursing professional.

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