High prevalence of burnout syndrome among medical and nonmedical residents during the COVID-19 pandemic

  1. Rebeca da Nóbrega Lucena Pinho
  2. Thais Ferreira Costa
  3. Nayane Miranda Silva
  4. Adriana Ferreira Barros Areal
  5. André de Matos Salles
  6. Andrea Pedrosa Ribeiro Alves Oliveira
  7. Carlos Henrique Reis Esselin Rassi
  8. Ciro Martins Gomes
  9. Dayde Lane Mendonça da Silva
  10. Fernando Araújo Rodrigues de Oliveira
  11. Isadora Jochims
  12. Ivan Henrique Ranulfo Vaz Filho
  13. Lucas Alves de Brito Oliveira
  14. Marta Alves Rosal
  15. Marta Pinheiro Lima
  16. Mayra Veloso Ayrimoraes Soares
  17. Patrícia Shu Kurisky
  18. Viviane Cristina Uliana Pertele
  19. Ana Paula Monteiro Gomides
  20. Licia Maria Henrique da Mota
  21. Cleandro Pires de Albuquerque
  22. Cezar Kozak Simaan
  23. Veronica Moreira Amado
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Abstract

Background

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, health professionals have been working under extreme conditions, increasing the risk of physical and mental illness. We evaluated the prevalence of burnout and its associated factors among postgraduate student residents in health professions during the global health crisis.

Methods

Healthcare residents were recruited from all across Brazil between July and September 2020 through digital forms containing instruments for assessing burnout (Oldenburg Burnout Inventory (OLBI)), resilience (brief resilient coping scale (BRCS)) and anxiety, stress and depression (depression, anxiety and stress scale (DASS-21) and Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9)). Additionally, the relationships between burnout and chronic diseases, autonomy and educational adequacy in the residency programme, personal protective equipment (PPE), workload and care for patients with COVID-19 were evaluated. The chi-square test, Student’s t test, Pearson’s correlation test and logistic regression were performed.

Results

A total of 1,313 participants were included: mean (standard deviation) age, 27.8 (4.4) years; female gender, 78.1%; white race, 59.3%; and physicians, 51.3%. The overall prevalence of burnout was 33.4%. The odds (odds ratio [95% confidence interval]) of burnout were higher in the presence of pre-existing diseases (1.76 [1.26– 2.47]) and weekly work > 60 h (1.36 [1.03–1.79]) and were lower in the presence of high resilience (0.84 [0.81–0.88]), autonomy (0.87 [0.81–0.93]), and educational structure (0.77 [0.73–0.82]), adequate availability of PPE (0.72 [0.63–0.83]) and non-white race (0.63 [0.47–0.83]). Burnout was correlated with anxiety (r = 0.47; p < 0.05), stress (r: 0.58; p < 0.05) and depression (r: 0.65; p < 0.05).

Conclusions

We observed a high prevalence of burnout among residents during the COVID-19 pandemic. Individual characteristics and conditions related to the work environment were associated with a higher or lower occurrence of the syndrome.

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