One of the rising concerns in medicine today is the effect of burnout on physician wellbeing and its consequences on physicians and their patients. What about on pediatric trainees? Are they experiencing burnout early in their careers, and if so how common is it, and does it have an effect on their care to children and families? Baer et al. (10.1542/peds.2016-2163) chose to study the problem of burnout in pediatric residents by cross-sectionally surveying residents from 11 different residency programs to determine if they were burned out (using the validated 2 question Maslach Burnout inventory) and whether that burnout affected resident attitudes toward the patients they cared for. Sadly, 39% of the 258 residents who completed the survey met criteria for burnout with similar percentages across all three years of training. Even more sadly, those residents who self-reported burnout also reported that they felt they were providing suboptimal patient care by discharging patients sooner than they might have been ready to be discharged to lighten their patient load, not taking the time to explain things to parents, making management errors, and ignoring the impact of an illness or diagnosis on a patent. These are disturbing findings and challenge all of us to seek solutions for wellness in ourselves and our trainees so data like this doesn’t become even more worrisome in future surveys of burnout prevalence (although this study is worrisome enough).
Serwint and her colleagues have offered us some guidelines for dealing with this issue that we published several months ago (10.1542/peds.2016-0791). Organizations like the AAP and the AMA are now making physician wellness a strategic priority. In addition, we have invited an expert on the subject of pediatrician burnout Dr. John Mahan from Nationwide Children’s (10.1542/peds.2016-4233) to share his perspective on pediatrician burnout in an accompanying commentary. Rather than tell us how burned out you may be feeling, we do hope you tell someone in your practice or hospital if that is how you feel. We do also hope you will share solutions that you feel help to make us more resilient despite the stressors of health care that seem omnipresent each and every day. Our journal will continue to provide studies and commentaries that speak to these issues—but we welcome your thoughts as well. You can share them with us by commenting on this blog, responding with a comment on our website where the full article is posted, or simply leaving your suggestions with us on our Facebook or Twitter sites. We won’t let the wellness light burn out and hope you won’t either. Fortunately helping a child overcome illness or stay well is one of the best ways we know to make us all feel better about what we do---and we hope you agree with us as well.
