Data: Physician burnout at record levels in America

OLIVER WHANG

NEW YORK TIMES

Ten years of data from a nationwide survey of physicians confirm another trend that’s worsened through the pandemic: Burnout rates among doctors in the United States, which were already high a decade ago, have risen to alarming levels.

Results released this month and published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings, a peer-reviewed journal, show that 63% of physicians surveyed reported at least one symptom of burnout at the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022, an increase from 44% in 2017 and 46% in 2011. Only 30% felt satisfied with their work-life balance, compared with 43% five years earlier.

“This is the biggest increase of emotional exhaustion that I’ve ever seen, anywhere in the literature,” said Bryan Sexton, the director of Duke University’s Center for Healthcare Safety and Quality, who was not involved in the survey efforts.

The most recent numbers also compare starkly with data from 2020, when the survey was run during the early stages of the pandemic. Then, 38% of doctors surveyed reported one or more symptoms of burnout while 46% were satisfied with their worklife balance.

“It’s just so stark how dramatically the scores have increased over the last 12 months,” said Dr. Tait Shanafelt, an oncologist at Stanford University who has led the research efforts.

Burnout among physicians has been linked to higher rates of alcohol abuse and suicidal ideation, as well as increased medical errors and worse patient outcomes. In May, the U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, issued an advisory.

“COVID-19 has been a uniquely traumatic experience for the health workforce and for their families,” he said, adding, “if we fail to act, we will place our nation’s health at risk.”

Shanafelt noted that most of the studies on burnout among physicians and health care workers at this stage of the pandemic have been focused on certain specialties and geographic hot spots, not on the profession as a whole. With the new data set, he said, “We have, for the first time, real context.”

While the idea of burnout has become ubiquitous, the condition has a definition in medical literature. The Maslach Burnout Inventory, first published in 1981, measures burnout on three dimensions: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization from work and sense of personal accomplishment.

When the metric was first proposed, a widely held belief was that burnout could be blamed on the dispositions of individual physicians — “that these are just weaklings,” explained Dr. Colin West, a physician at the Mayo Clinic who helped conceive of the survey efforts.