Prevalence of Health Care Worker Burnout During the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Pandemic in Japan

Abstract

with among the highest numbers of patients with COVID-19 in the country. We selected HCWs, including physicians, nurses, laboratory medical technologists, radiological technologists, and pharmacists, who worked in departments in which they had contact with patients with COVID-19, including emergency departments, general internal medicine departments, respiratory medicine departments, infectious disease departments, general wards, and intensive care units. An explanation of the sample size calculation appears in the eAppendix in the Supplement. This study was approved by the institutional review board of St Luke's International Hospital in Tokyo, Japan. A letter of informed consent was distributed to the participants via email, and completion of the questionnaire implied their consent. This study followed the Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (STROBE) reporting guideline.The web-based survey was generated using SurveyMonkey, a cloud-based survey development application. The survey solicited responses regarding participants' demographic characteristics (age and gender), professional history (job category and years of experience), working environment characteristics (mean weekly working hours, days off per month, and hours of sleep per day), types of anxiety perceived, changes compared with before the pandemic, and types of support needed.The primary outcome was the prevalence of burnout among frontline HCWs in departments with direct contact with patients with COVID-19, using the validated Japanese version of the Maslach Burnout Inventory-General Survey, 3 which is currently considered the criterion standard for measuring burnout. This 16-item questionnaire contains 3 subscales that evaluate what are considered the 3 major domains of burnout, ie, emotional exhaustion, cynicism (ie, depersonalization), and professional efficacy (ie, personal accomplishment). High levels of exhaustion (>3.5) plus either high cynicism (>3.5) or low professional efficacy (<2.5) were selected as the primary criteria for burnout.We first compared the baseline characteristics of those who did and did not have burnout by using the χ 2 difference test for categorical variables and the Mann-Whitney U test for continuous variables. Given the limited information available on confounding by potential risk factors for burnout, we used logistic regression analyses to evaluate whether any factors, such as types of anxiety perceived, changes compared with the prepandemic period, and types of support needed, were significant by integrating data on the participants' backgrounds into the model. All analyses

Occupational Burnout and Job Satisfaction Among Physicians in Times of COVID-19 Crisis: A Convergent Parallel Mixed-Method Study

“…Female gender and higher workload were found to be positively associated with burnout in our study, this has been also reported by Matsue et al, who found that female gender, exposure to higher workload as well as the desire for appreciation were all signi cantly associated with burnout among healthcare workers during the current pandemic [42]. Despite that the logistic regression model in our study did not nd COVID-19 nancial incentives as a predicting factor of burnout, many physicians in our qualitative interviews have reported the need for a reliable acknowledgment to HCPs emotionally and nancially, which relates to Matsue et al nding of desire for appreciation.…”

Burnout in Spanish Security Forces during the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…For example, a lot of research is being done concerning other occupations such as health workers, teachers, etc. [5,[55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65].…”

The Effect of Stress, Anxiety and Burnout Levels of Healthcare Professionals Caring for COVID-19 Patients on Their Quality of Life

“…In studies conducted outside the epidemic period, high levels of burnout have been reported among healthcare professionals both in our country and in the world (Erol et al, 2012;Kansoun et al, 2019). In the study of Matsuo et al (2020), where they investigated the prevalence of burnout in healthcare professionals during the COVID-19 outbreak in Japan with the participation of 488 healthcare professionals, the overall burnout prevalence was found to be 31.4% (98 out of 312). 59 (46.8%) of 126 nurses, 8 (36.4%) of 22 radiology technologists, and 7 (36.8%) of 19 pharmacists were experiencing burnout.…”