Promoting resilience in academic medicine: Fertile ground for future work

Journal article

In today’s academic healthcare systems, there are escalating demands on physicians to increase clinical and academic productivity, but limited resources to achieve these goals. This causes increasing stress on physicians who are already at risk of burnout. Maslach et al have described burnout as: “What started out as important, meaningful and challenging work becomes unpleasant, unfulfilling and meaningless. Energy turns to exhaustion, involvement turns to cynicism, and efficacy turns into ineffectiveness.”1

Three main components of burnout include emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and low personal accomplishment. Emotional exhaustion and stress exist in a vicious cycle, where increased emotional exhaustion leads to increased stress and increased stress leads to increased emotional exhaustion. Depersonalization or cynicism is a protective mechanism and decreases stress, whereas personal accomplishment increases stress directly as well as indirectly by increasing emotional exhaustion.2 Burnout leads to high physician turnover, which is costly for organizations and has been associated with suboptimal patient care practices, medical errors, reduced empathy, and decreased patient satisfaction.3 Enhancing the personal qualities and skills needed to thrive in healthcare’s challenging environment is clearly essential.

Authors: O'Brien, SE; Simpkin, AL; Spector, ND

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Reviewed (other)
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Journal: Journal of Pediatrics
• Volume: 182
• Pages: 6-7
• Publication date: 2016-12-01
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jpeds.2016.11.056
• EISSN: 1097-6833
• ISSN: 0022-3476