Assessment and Prevention of Burnout in Canadian Pharmacy Residency Programs

There is a paucity of literature describing the incidence of burnout among Canadian pharmacy residents, despite evidence that pharmacy professionals are at high risk of burnout.

To characterize Canadian pharmacy residents experiencing high levels of burnout, as defined by the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), to describe existing interventions that Canadian pharmacy residents perceive to be effective in managing burnout, and to describe opportunities for Canadian pharmacy residency programs in managing resident burnout.

An online survey, consisting of 22 validated questions from the MBI and 19 nonvalidated questions developed by the investigators, was distributed by email to 558 Canadian pharmacy residents from the 2020/21, 2019/20, and 2018/19 residency years.

A total of 115 partial or complete survey responses were included in the analysis, and 107 respondents completed the MBI section of the survey. Of these, 62% (66/107) were at high risk of burnout according to at least 1 MBI subscale, with a slight majority of the entire sample being at high risk of burnout on the emotional exhaustion subscale (55/107 [51%]). The most common interventions offered to pharmacy residents to reduce or prevent burnout were mentorship programs, schedule changes, and promotion of self-organization. Current interventions reported to be the most useful were self-care workshops, discussion groups, and workload adjustment. Potential future interventions perceived to be most useful for reducing and preventing burnout were schedule changes and workload adjustment.

More than half of Canadian pharmacy residents who responded to the survey were at high risk of burnout. Canadian pharmacy residency programs should consider implementing additional interventions to help reduce and prevent resident burnout.