Prevalence of Burnout Among Physicians

Abstract

The concept of burnout in health care emerged in the late 1960s as a way to colloquially describe the emotional and psychological stress experienced by clinic staff caring for structurally vulnerable patients in free clinics.¹ Since then, the term burnout has been used to characterize job-related stress in any health practice environment, from hospitals in urban communities to global health settings.^2,3 This expansion of the scope of burnout has made it useful for describing the shared experience and stress of medical practice, particularly in conjunction with research demonstrating elevated levels of depressive symptoms among physicians.^4,5 Building on foundational work by Maslach et al⁶ in the 1980s, researchers have described burnout as a combination of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and low personal accomplishment caused by the chronic stress of medical practice. In the research literature, “overall” or “aggregate” burnout is typically measured by assessing some combination of these 3 subcomponents. Some studies have found that physician burnout is associated with increased medical errors, lower patient satisfaction, longer postdischarge recovery times, and decreased professional work effort.^7-9 Consequently, there is interest among researchers, clinicians, and health policy leaders in ascertaining the prevalence and drivers of burnout in physicians.