Stress at work and burnout syndrome in hospital doctors

Reforming the health care system in Bosnia and Herzegovina began in 1998 through various forms of amendments to existing health plans and programs. There has been the introduction of new technologies, flow of new information from the profession, excessive demands on employers, financial constraints, etc. The hospital doctors in the workplace suffer from too many stressors. Burnout syndrome at work is a form of chronic stress reactions to stressors, and develops as a result of inefficient coping with and solving every day, demanding stressful situations related to professional duties.

The goals of this study were: to identify the specific stressors of high intensity in the hospital physicians work environment, to discover whether and how certain stressors can affect the appearance of burnout syndrome at work in a hospital physician, to determine whether certain individual factors influence the occurrence of burnout syndrome at work.

We made the intersection study involving the use of questionnaires, in order to assess the stressors and burnout syndrome in hospital among doctors of the University Clinical Center in Tuzla.

The study comprised 34.7% hospital doctors (specialists and doctors on specialization) of a total 423 employees in various departments of the University Hospital Clinical Center in Tuzla. High level of emotional exhaustion was recorded in 37.4%, a high level of depersonalization in 45.6%, and a low level in perceptions of personal accomplishments in 50.3% of respondents.

Continuous exposure to stressors at the workplace, such as work at shifts, excessive workload, poor communication with superiors, and lack of continuous education of hospital physicians can lead to mental and physical exhaustion, professional burnout. Management of the University Clinical Center Tuzla should in the future address the structural reorganization of workplaces, as well as ongoing prevention interventions in other domains of risk factors or stressors, that this study identified.