Posted on 19 December 2017
Burnout is a severe problem affecting medical personnel and healthcare organizations. Burnout is defined as emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and low feelings of personal accomplishment. Burnout has many consequences for the individual including physical illness, increased feelings of hopelessness, irritability, impatience, poor interpersonal relationships with family/coworkers/patients, and drug abuse. In severe cases, burnout can cause diminished executive functioning, attention, and memory. Burnout has many organizational consequences including absenteeism, increased turnover, and decreased job performance. These consequences can have a direct negative effect on patient safety, satisfaction, and quality of care. Burnout must be assessed for severity and cause, and remediated by individual intervention and sophisticated organizational change programs.
Mind Garden is fully committed to the development of products and services that support researchers, healthcare organizations, and medical personnel in the assessment, prevention, and remediation of burnout in the medical field. We will continue to work in the following areas:
Publish and support the Maslach Burnout Inventory™ (MBI): The MBI is recognized as the leading measure of burnout and has been validated by extensive research since 1981. The MBI is used to assess professional burnout and understand the nature of burnout for developing effective interventions.
Publish and support the Areas of Worklife Survey (AWS): As a companion tool to the MBI, the AWS scores profile can help identify work-setting causes of burnout.
Offer Customization Services: Support survey customization and Group Report customization on our Transform™ system. We are determined to make it easy and affordable for healthcare organizations and other stakeholders to collect and interpret burnout scores. Burnout data can be parsed by demographics such as hospital/clinic location and medical specialty.
Support Affordable Research: Offer products and services at reasonable rates to support affordable assessments by researchers and students.
Develop educational resources: In conjunction with burnout researchers, provide information to educate medical organizations about burnout prevention and remediation.
Support burnout measurement at the individual and organizational levels.
Publish burnout surveys: Provide surveys that facilitate a better understanding of the extent and cause of burnout.
This organizational commitment statement is in response to a national call for commitment statements by the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) as part of the Action Collaborative on Clinician Well-Being and Resilience.
Click here for a full list of organizations who have submitted formal statements.