Assessment of health workers´ engagement in Uruguay using the Utrecht work engagement scale (UWES)

The aim of this paper was to examine the psychometric properties of the Spanish version of the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES) in its 17-item version for the assessment of health workers in Uruguay. The sample consisted of 1,324 workers of both sexes (63.7% of women) from different health institutions, public (45.7%) and private (54.3%), in Montevideo and from the rest of the country (64.4% and 35.6% respectively). The internal consistency analyzes, employing Cronbach's alpha coefficient, reveal satisfactory levels of internal consistency for the total scale and the three factors, and reinforce the evidence of weakness of two items on the scale. The factorial structure analyzes by confirmatory factor analysis show an adequate fit of the trifactorial model to the data, although the high correlation between the latent factors could indicate that the unifactorial model may also be acceptable. Evidence from this study suggests that the Spanish version of the UWES-17 may be a valid and reliable instrument for the measurement of engagement and its three factors in health workers in Uruguay.