Well-being and Burnout among Pre-clinical Medical Students in a Caribbean Medical School

Abstract

Evaluate well-being and burnout among preclinical medical students in a Caribbean medical school and identify the associated factors. It was a questionnaire-based, cross-sectional study which was conducted among preclinical medical students of Trinity Medical Sciences University (TMSU), Saint Vincent & the Grenadines. Medical Student Well-Being Index and Maslach Burnout Inventory-Student Survey were used. The total number of participants who gave informed consent was 82. For statisti­cal analyses, internal consistency of the instruments was tested by Cronbach’s alpha. The Student t-test, Fisher’s exact test, Pearson correlation and multivariate regression model were used. The analysis of well-being index(WBI-MS) showed that during the past month 78% of participants experienced burnout due to emotional exhaustion and 61% due to depersonalization, 63.4% felt depression, 19.5% experienced fatigue, 65.9% suffered from stress. The significant association was found between well-being index, credit hours allotted for the semester, and depersonalization/cynicism. Also there was significant negative correlation among academic efficacy and cynicism. The analysis also showed that once a week or more often 58.5 % of participants experienced emotional exhaustion, 34.2% depersonalization and 26.8% low professional efficacy. But the level (severity) of emotional exhaustion was less in comparison with depersonalization score. Our study revealed that 65.9% of participants had a low well-being index and high level of burnout with very increased score of cynicism, which negatively affected their academic efficacy. The possible causes of the obtained results were identified and necessary strategies will be implemented to improve the outcomes.