Hospital Staff Report It Is Not Burnout, but a Normal Stress Reaction to an Uncongenial Work Environment: Findings from a Qualitative Study.

Madeleine Kendrick,Kevin Kendrick,Nicholas F Taylor,Peter Morton,Sandra G Leggat

doi:10.3390/ijerph17114107

Abstract

(1) Background: The issue of burnout in healthcare staff is frequently discussed in relation to occupational health. In this paper, we report healthcare staff experiences of stress and burnout. (2) Methods: In total, 72 healthcare staff were interviewed from psychiatry, surgery, and emergency departments at an Australian public health service. The sample included doctors, nurses, allied health professionals, administrators, and front-line managers. Interview transcripts were thematically analyzed, with participant experiences interpreted against descriptors of burnout in Maslach’s Burnout Inventory and the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-11). (3) Results: Staff experiences closely matched the ICD-11 description of stress associated with working in an uncongenial workplace, with few reported experiences which matched the ICD-11 descriptors of burnout. (4) Conclusion: Uncongenial workplaces in public health services contribute to healthcare staff stress. While previous approaches have focused on biomedical assistance for individuals, our findings suggest that occupational health approaches to addressing health care staff stress need greater focus on the workplace as a social determinant of health. This finding is significant as organizational remedies to uncongenial stress are quite different from remedies to burnout.

Highlights

Since authors Freudenberger and Maslach [1,2] published their works on burnout, studies on how ‘unmitigated, chronic stress’ impacts individuals have evolved from identifying antecedents to discussing remedies and preventative measures
The researchers sought to explore the patient-facing staff experiences of stress and burnout in a large health service by comparing interview responses to Maslach’s Burnout Inventory (MBI) [2] and the ICD-11 [9]. The data of this exploratory study and its implications came as a surprise after the focus of burnout in media and academic sources suggested a trend in public health workplaces [3,8,12]
While our analysis showed that the majority of participants in this project did not suffer from burnout, burnout remains the endpoint of long-term stressful experiences for an individual [1,2,10]

Summary

Introduction

Since authors Freudenberger and Maslach [1,2] published their works on burnout, studies on how ‘unmitigated, chronic stress’ impacts individuals have evolved from identifying antecedents to discussing remedies and preventative measures. The consequences of burned-out healthcare staff are staff shortages and lower quality of patient care [6,7]. Research identifying how ‘burnout’ can overlap with other conditions, such as depression [8], has suggested the need to further distinguish burnout from other workplace-related issues to improve worker health and wellbeing. To assist with this differentiation the authors took a different approach to most studies of burnout. This article explores patient-facing healthcare staff perspectives of stress and burnout by using the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, Int. J. Public Health 2020, 17, 4107; doi:10.3390/ijerph17114107 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph

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