In 2017, there were 55,032 GPs, most of them trained in either general medicine or internal medicine. In Germany, registered physicians with own practices provide the majority of outpatient care. (1994) identified various interpersonal factors as relevant stressors in medicine such as uncooperative physician peers, lack of staff and uncooperative patients. Certain personality traits commonly found in physicians, such as high control demand, perfectionism, inflexibility or overcommitment, have been discussed to promote stress in physicians. Different stressors leading to burnout in physicians have been identified, such as lack of influence/autonomy, high workload and lack of time for private life activities. Burnout was also shown to have a negative impact on job performance and was associated with hostile attitudes towards patients, difficulties relating with co-workers or increased intentions to quit the job. Several systematic reviews have reported significant associations between burnout among medical staff and poor quality of healthcare including an increased number of medical errors. It includes $185 million attributable to early retirement and $28 million attributable to reduced working hours.
This reflects the value of services lost to the healthcare system if the physician does not work. According to another Canadian study, the financial burden caused by physicians suffering from burnout is estimated as $213 million over the next 26 years. This corresponded to a Canadian study with similar results. In 2008, the European General Practice Research Network found a burnout prevalence of 32% to 43% among GPs from 12 European countries. In another US study of 2012, general practitioners (GPs) were found to be the physician specialty with the highest reported burnout rates. (2015) reported the risk of burnout in physicians to be twice as high compared to the general population. Physicians have also been found to be especially prone to job-related burnout: In a study from the United States (US), Shanafelt et al. (2017) found about one third of emergency nurses to be burnt out. (2017) report a prevalence of work-related burnout of 43.8% in a sample of 1037 Australian midwives and a meta-analysis by Gomez-Urquiza et al.
Although the concept of burnout and its relationship to chronic stress, depression and other mental health disorders is still under debate, numerous studies describe high burnout prevalence in different professional groups, especially workers in the health care sector. The average duration of illness was 37.1 days. Īccording to the 2013 health report of one of Germany’s largest sickness funds, burnout accounted for 10 days of sick leave per 100 insured people in 2012. Burnout was found to have severe health impacts on affected individuals, for instance sleep disturbance, feelings of depression and anxiety, and an increase in alcohol and drug misuse. Further research summarized the symptoms of burnout to the three dimensions emotional exhaustion (EE), feeling of depersonalization (DP) and low personal accomplishment (PA). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.īurnout was first described by Herbert Freudenberger in 1974 as consequence of overcommitment of workers in social professions resulting in tiredness, dullness and physical complaints. However, requests for an ethically compliant dataset may be made to the Ethics Committee of the Medical Faculty of the Universtiy of Duisburg-Essen ( Funding for this study was provided by the Ministry of Culture and Science, North-Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, formerly the Ministry of Innovation, Science and Research, North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: Ethical restrictions have been imposed on the data underlying this study by the Ethics Committee of the Medical Faculty of the University of Duisburg-Essen in order to protect participant confidentiality. Received: JAccepted: JanuPublished: February 6, 2019Ĭopyright: © 2019 Dreher et al. Wilkinson, Charles Sturt University, AUSTRALIA Citation: Dreher A, Theune M, Kersting C, Geiser F, Weltermann B (2019) Prevalence of burnout among German general practitioners: Comparison of physicians working in solo and group practices.