More than half of US physicians are experiencing professional burnout, new research shows.
The study conducted by Mayo Clinic researchers in partnership with the American Medical Association compared data from 2014 to metrics they collected in 2011. The findings appear in Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
Watch a video discussing the results.
These dimensions remained largely unchanged among US workers in general, resulting in a widening gap between physicians and workers in other fields.
“Burnout manifests as emotional exhaustion, loss of meaning in work, and feelings of ineffectiveness,” says Tait Shanafelt, MD, a hematologist at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. “What we found is that more physicians in almost every specialty are feeling this way, and that’s not good for them, their families, the medical profession, or patients.”
Burnout leads to poor care, physician turnover, and a decline in the overall quality of the healthcare system, the researchers point out. In the 2011 survey, 45% of physicians met the burnout criteria, with the highest rates occurring in the “front lines” — general internal medicine, family medicine, and emergency medicine. In 2014, 54% of responding physicians had at least one symptom of burnout. Satisfaction with work-life balance also declined.
Other highlights of the survey include:
* Physician burnout is up 10% over the last 3 years
* Burnout rates are up across almost all specialties
* No overall increase in physician work hours was reported
* No increase in rates of depression was observed among physicians
To help combat physician burnout. more needs to be done by healthcare organizations to improve the efficiency of the practice environment, reduce the clerical burden, and provide physicians greater flexibility and control over work.
The survey results were based on 6,880 physicians across the United States—a 19% response rate—as well as a population based sample of 5,313 working US adults in other fields.
All of my frustrations and burnout begin and end with the federal government. Hospitals are told that they must have EHR systems and both hospitals in my town have total trash for systems. We have been admonished in days past about using too many abbreviations. One of the hospital systems which requires that we select a frequency for drug administration has about 75 abbreviations, most of which no doctor has ever heard before. We are not allowed to free text anything, all orders must be found and checked. As I was trying to get a patient ready for surgery I needed to print out a consent for surgery. I typed consent. No good. I typed surgery. No good. After ten minutes of wasting time guessing, a nurse said, “type ‘obtain consent.'” Bingo. There are 10,000 things in the hospital and some moron programmer requires that I guess the word “obtain.” It is just so frustrating. We should not have to use such trash, but the hospital bought it for over a million dollars and they will have their reimbursements fall if we don’t use it. I wish a slow miserable death on Andy Slavitt and the rest of the morons who think they know how we should better practice medicine.