Some Recent Physician Burnout Literature

An abstract, presented at the the annual meeting and published in the Journal of American College of Surgeons’ supplement examined relationship between burnout and involvement of surgeons in medical device development/innovation.

As is often found in medical students across the world, New Zealand’s medical students also appear to have high levels of burnout. Farrell et al surveyed one of the two medical school in New Zealand and found that the prevalence of exhaustion was 77% while of disengagement was 68%. Another proof that burnout in medical profession is a worldwide phenomenon.

A study examined burnout among Egyptian ICU physicians and found interesting results. The level of exhaustion was 38.8%, somewhat better than generally found in the West. However, the level of depersonalization was 70.1%. This is really surprising; do Egyptian physicians really feel that much disconnected or disengaged from their patients?