Burnout in the Pharmaceutical Activity: The Impact of COVID-19

Abstract

Objectives: Pharmacists are among the healthcare professionals involved in the response to COVID-19 pandemic, maintaining essential services. The study aimed to assess the occurrence of pharmacist’s burnout and determine outcomes for each of its dimensions; identify potentially associated characteristics; and determine profiles and critical limits.Design and Setting: Cross-sectional observational study comprising an electronic survey addressed to Portuguese Pharmaceutical Society members.Participants: From a total of 1362 participants, 91.4% were involved in direct and 7.7 % in non-direct patient care activity.Outcome measures: The statistical analysis, performed with 2-tailed significance set at PResults: Concern for the future (77.2.5%), workload (72.7%), scarcity of resources (62.4%), and loss of control over the activity (54.6%) were the main influencing factors on work-related feelings. Pharmacists who had been trained in COVID-19 were the most confident and showed a higher efficacy/outcome rate. Workload appears only as a predictor of high EE, with great impact on those who worked during the 3-month period more than 50 hours per week and on those who worked almost every weekend. The latter with greater predictive power of high EE (p≤0,001).Conclusions: The new profile-based approach provides an understanding of the burnout experience and distinct relationships with various work-life factors and suggests that each profile reflects a different work-life crisis that would require a unique intervention strategy. Pharmacists who have been involved in direct care activities are at the highest risk of burnout. However, they were able to avoid depersonalisation and cynicism and thereby burnout syndrome.Funding Information: This work was supported by the Portuguese Pharmaceutical Society. This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.Declaration of Interests: None.Ethics Approval Statement: The institutional review board of the of the Portuguese Pharmaceutical Society approved the project as exempt and without ethical reservations to its resolution, since (i) the procedures concerning the anonymity of the data and the information provided to the volunteers are foreseen and (ii) the nature of the elements to be collected does not carry the risk of revealing weaknesses unknown to the volunteer and thus triggering unpredictable reactions. Selecting the electronic link served as first consent to participate voluntarily in the study.