Job Burnout on Subjective Well-Being Among Chinese Female Doctors: The Moderating Role of Perceived Social Support

To better understand clinical empathy and what factors can undermine its experience and outcome in care-giving settings, a large-scale study was conducted with 7,584 board certified practicing physicians. Online validated instruments assessing different aspects of empathy, distress, burnout, altruistic behavior, emotional awareness, and well-being were used. Compassion satisfaction was strongly associated with empathic concern, perspective taking and altruism, while compassion fatigue (burnout and secondary traumatic stress) was more closely related to personal distress and alexithymia. Gender had a highly selective effect on empathic concern, with women displaying higher values, which led to a wide array of negative and devalued feelings. Years of experience did not influence dispositional measures per se after controlling for the effect of age and gender. Participants who experienced compassion fatigue with little to no compassion satisfaction showed the highest scores on personal distress and alexithymia as well as the strongest indicators of compassion fatigue. Physicians who have difficulty regulating their negative arousal and describing and identifying emotions seem to be more prone to emotional exhaustion, detachment, and a low sense of accomplishment. On the contrary, the ability to engage in self-other awareness and regulate one’s emotions and the tendency to help others, seem to contribute to the sense of compassion that comes from assisting patients in clinical practice.

This study aimed to examine the relationship between work stress and depression; and investigate the mediating effect of occupational burnout among nurses in paediatric intensive care units.

Background Female doctors in Hungary have worse indicators of physical and mental health compared with other professional women. We aimed to cast light on possible indicators of mental health, workload, and burnout of female physicians. Methods Two time-points (T) were compared, in 2003 (T1 n = 408) and 2013 (T2 n = 2414), based on two nationally representative surveys of female doctors, and comparison made with data from other professional control groups. Independent samples t test or chi-squared test was used both for the two time-point comparison and the comparison between the index and the control groups. The background factors of sleep disorders and burnout were assessed by binary logistic regression analysis. Results No significant differences in the rates of depressive symptoms and suicidal thoughts and attempts were detected between the 2003 and 2013 cohorts, but the prevalence of sleep disorders increased. The workload increased, and there was less job satisfaction in 2013 than in 2003, coupled to more stressful or difficult work-related situations. The personal accomplishment component of burnout significantly decreased in line with the declining work-related satisfaction. Compared to the professional control groups, the prevalence of depressive symptoms, suicide attempts, and sleep disorders was higher among female physicians at both time-points. The number of workplaces, frequency of work-related stressful situations, and intensive role conflict was associated with sleep disorders and decreased personal accomplishment. Conclusions In comparison with the other professional groups, female doctors had worse mental health indicators with regard to depression, suicidal ideas, and sleep disorders both in 2003 and 2013 while within professional strata the changes seemed to be less. Increasing workload had a clear impact on sleep disorders and the personal accomplishment dimension of burnout.