4. Discussion
The present study of 11,530 Spanish-speaking healthcare professionals from Spain and Latin America reveals a considerable prevalence of adverse professional consequences associated especially with the different components of the burnout syndrome, particularly in terms of personal and family deterioration, and the intention of giving up the profession. The results are in broad agreement with the hypotheses that were formulated, although no conclusion can be reached with regards the optimism variable, which was only found to have a protecting influence in the perception of committing mistakes and family deterioration in certain countries. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to analyse adverse working consequences in such a large sample of Spanish-speaking healthcare workers.