Abstract
BackgroundBurnout results from excessive demands at work. Caregivers suffering from burnout show a state of emotional exhaustion, leading them to distance themselves from their patients and to become less efficient in their work. While some studies have shown a negative impact of burnout on physicians’ clinical reasoning, others have failed to demonstrate any such impacts. To better understand the link between clinical reasoning and burnout, we carried out a study looking for an association between burnout and clinical reasoning in a population of general practice residents.MethodsWe conducted a cross-sectional observational study among residents in general practice in 2017 and 2019. Clinical reasoning performance was assessed using a script concordance test (SCT). The Maslach Burnout Inventory for Human Services Survey (MBI-HSS) was used to determine burnout status in both original standards of Maslach’s burnout inventory manual (conventional approach) and when individuals reported high emotional exhaustion in combination with high depersonalization or low personal accomplishment compared to a norm group (“emotional exhaustion +1” approach).ResultsOne hundred ninety-nine residents were included. The participants’ mean SCT score was 76.44% (95% CI: 75.77–77.10). In the conventional approach, 126 residents (63.31%) had no burnout, 37 (18.59%) had mild burnout, 23 (11.56%) had moderate burnout, and 13 (6.53%) had severe burnout. In the “exhaustion + 1“ approach, 38 residents had a burnout status (19.10%). We found no significant correlation between burnout status and SCT scores either for conventional or “exhaustion + 1“ approaches.ConclusionsOur data seem to indicate that burnout status has no significant impact on clinical reasoning. However, one speculation is that SCT mostly examines the clinical reasoning process’s analytical dimension, whereas emotions are conventionally associated with the intuitive dimension. We think future research might aim to explore the impact of burnout on intuitive clinical reasoning processes.
Highlights
Burnout results from excessive demands at work
To better understand the link between clinical reasoning and burnout, we carried out a study looking for an association between burnout status and lower clinical reasoning performance in a population of residents in general practice
We designed a cross-sectional observational study looking for a statistical association between the scores on the French version of the Maslach Burnout InventoryHuman Services Survey (MBI-HSS) [17] and a script concordance test (SCT) [18]
Summary
Burnout results from excessive demands at work. One of the current main theoretical models assumes the existence of two cognitive processes commonly used by physicians to perform these steps [10, 11]: intuitive processes (system 1) and analytical processes (system 2). Both systems are jointly involved in most physicians’ decisions: reasoning always starts intuitively (system 1), generating one or more possible solutions, and the analytical system (system 2) will allow confirmation or invalidation of the relevance of these (hypotheses selection) [12]
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