Assessment of Burnout and its Factors Among Doctors Using the Abbreviated Maslach Burnout Inventory

Abstract

Background Occupational burnout is an unwanted outcome of chronic workplace stressors which may be emotional or interpersonal. Chronic exposure to human suffering and long working hours have contributed to greater job stress and early burnout among healthcare providers. This study utilized the abbreviated Maslach Burnout Inventory (aMBI) to gauge the extent of overall burnout and on three subscales – perspective taking, compassionate care, and walking in patients' shoes – among interns, postgraduate trainees, and physicians of internal medicine. Materials and methods In this cross-sectional study, 71 internal medicine doctors – 40 interns, 22 postgraduate trainees, and nine physicians – completed aMBI with informed consent. It is a nine-item scale with three subscales – emotional exhaustion (EE), depersonalization (DP), and personal accomplishment (PA). Each subscale has three items that are marked on a seven-point Likert scale. Higher scores of EE and DP indicate higher burnout, and a higher score of PA indicates lower burnout. Overall burnout was taken as the sum of EE and DP. Data were entered and analyzed using SPSS v. 22. Results There were 23 (32.4%) male and 48 (67.5%) female doctors with a mean age of 24.25 ± 13.17 years. The mean score of overall burnout was 22.51 ± 6.07 (range: 0–36) and PA was 15.35 ± 1.82 (range: 0–18). Overall moderate to high burnout was seen in 33.8% of doctors. On an individual subscale, 47.8% had high EE, 24% had high DP, and 25.4% reported high burnout on PA. Overall burnout had a statistically significant correlation with the marital status of the doctors, their working hours per week, their average on-call days per week, and their level of expertise. Conclusion There is a high degree of burnout among internal medicine physicians. Working hours and the number of on-call days per week were significant predicting factors. Interns reported the highest frequency of burnout.

Examining and Adapting the Psychometric Properties of the Maslach Burnout Inventory-Health Services Survey (MBI-HSS) among Healthcare Professionals

“…In questioning of the internal consistency of the MBI, depersonalization has been found to have lower reliability than the other two subscales. This finding has been consistent across both the original version and translated versions of the MBI [11]. Different alterations to the tool have often been made by changing the number of factors or items.…”

“…Despite these efforts, however, the results obtained by these versions were not conclusive enough to justify reconstructing the original tool [3]. The 3 dimensions of burnout were previously considered to be independent in their functioning based on Maslach's interpretation, but recent studies have indicated a contradicting view, as the dimensions appear to correlate with one another, with correlations up to 0.73 between depersonalization and emotional exhaustion, 0.49 between personal accomplishment and emotional exhaustion, and 0.62 between depersonalization and personal accomplishment [11]. According to several studies, personal accomplishment is observed to be the subscale that shows the weakest association with the other dimensions.…”

Burnout among postgraduate doctors in Colombo: prevalence, associated factors and association with self-reported patient care

“…The global prevalence of burnout among postgraduate doctors is shown vary from 27 to 75% [4–6] . It is associated with multiple stressors in the personal and family life [4, 7–11], work life [6, 8, 12–16], as well as factors related to their education, training and the learning environment [10, 15]. Burnout compromises postgraduate doctors’ quality of life, productivity, performance, ability to acquire knowledge and their satisfaction regarding the training programme [17, 18].…”

Burnout among Plastic Surgery Residents in India: An Observational Study

“…As described by Shaikh et al, 12 we combined the scores of EE and DP to calculate the overall burnout score. For EE and DP, subscale score of 0 to 9 was regarded as “no-to-low burnout” and subscale score of 10 to 18 was regarded as “moderate-to-severe burnout.” It was opposite for PA because higher PA scores indicate lesser burnout.…”