Clinical question: Is physician burnout associated with more patient safety issues, low professionalism, or poor patient satisfaction?
Background: Burnout is common among physicians and has a negative effect on their personal lives. It is unclear whether physician burnout is associated with poor outcomes for patients.
Study design: Meta-analysis.
Setting: Forty-seven published studies from 19 countries assessing inpatient and outpatient physicians and the relationship between physician burnout and patient care.
Dr. Erin Gabriel
Synopsis: After a systematic review of the published literature, 47 studies were included to pool data from 42,473 physicians. Study subjects included residents, early-career and late-career physicians, and both hospital and outpatient physicians. All studies used validated measures of physician burnout.
Burnout was associated with a two-fold increased risk of physician-reported safety incidents (odds ratio, 1.96; 95% confidence interval, 1.59-2.40), low professionalism (OR, 2.31; 95% CI, 1.87-2.85), and likelihood of low patient-reported satisfaction (OR, 2.28; 95% CI, 1.42-3.68). There were no significant differences in these results based on country of origin of the study. Early-career physicians were more likely to have burnout associated with low professionalism than were late-career physicians.
Of the components of burnout, depersonalization was most strongly associated with these negative outcomes. Interestingly, the increased risk of patient safety incidents was associated with physician-reported, but not health care system–reported, patient safety outcomes. This raises concerns that the health care systems may not be capturing “near misses” in their metrics.
Bottom line: Physician burnout doubles the risk of being involved in a patient safety incident, low professionalism, and poor patient satisfaction.
Citation: Panagioti M et al. Association between physician burnout and patient safety, professionalism, and patient satisfaction. JAMA Intern Med. 2018;178(10):1317-30.
Dr. Gabriel is assistant professor of medicine and director of Pre-operative Medicine and Medicine Consult Service in the division of hospital medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital, New York.
