Physician Burnout & Patient Satisfaction/Experience

There have been concerns that physician burnout leads to lower patient satisfaction. In fact, some studies have found that patient satisfaction is lower among physicians with higher levels of burnout. A meta-analysis published in 2018 assimilated data and reached to the same conclusion. However, the quality of data, and studies, is questionable and there is a need for better conducted studies to examine this relationship.

A recently published article, by Howell et al., in the Journal of Patient Experience found no relationship between patient satisfaction and physician burnout domains of exhaustion and disengagement. This is an interesting finding and has strong implications. What it shows is that despite having high levels of burnout, physicians are able to function in a way that their patients don’t see a difference based on their burnout level. The brunt of burnout is faced by physicians and they shield their patients from its effects, likely at high personal cost.

Obviously, there may be other explanations – for example, the tools used to measure physician burnout are not reliably measuring burnout or that the tools to measure patient satisfaction with physicians are inaccurate and have large measurement bias. Both of these two explanations are possible but less plausible.