Burnout in Emergency Medicine Physicians and Interventions for Preventing and Mitigating It: A Literature Review

During the last decades, there is a growing appreciation of physicians’ burnout in the medical world as well as increased scientific literature. Burnout is a negative term, a condition that is both complex and difficult to define. Freudenberger in his article ‘Staff burnout’ in 1974 described burnout as “chronic stress associated with emotionally intense work- demands for which resources are inadequate”. Freudenberg and Maslach focused their research on burnout and have identified three dimensions of this psychological syndrome: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment. According to Maslach, those three dimensions can be summarized as “exhaustion”, “cynicism” and “inefficacy”. Those three terms provide a measurement tool for identifying burnout. This assessment tool is the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), with 22 questions, each scored from 0 to 6, addressing the three dimensions of burnout, avoiding this way a simplified black and white diagnosis of burnout. Burnout has been historically seen as a personal weakness, one that physicians tried either to hide or to deny experiencing. Doctors were supposed to be superhuman, working long hours in stressful conditions, never complaining. And because of this culture, physicians suffered in silence.

Author(s): Alex Christopoulos

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