Abstract

Background:

Physician burnout has been a long-standing problem for the medical community; burnout rates among physicians are the highest of any profession. However, sub-specialties within medicine significantly differ in their burnout rates.

Aim/Hypothesis: 

We suspected that burnout rates were different between surgeon and non-surgeon physicians. We first tried to show this and then determined what factors cause this difference.

Methods:

We performed a systematic review and used data from Medscape’s National Physician Burnout and Depression Reports from 2017 to 2020. The data reported by Medscape from various specialties was first split into two categories: medicine and surgery. We then found the average rate of burnout within each group and calculated a p-value and odds ratio. Then, we searched various databases such as PubMed and Google Scholar to determine the top factors related to burnout and compared those between non-surgeon and surgeon physicians.

Results:

The average rate of burnout among the top five surgical specialties was 44.7% compared to 49.4% for the top five non-surgical specialties (OR: 1.25; 95%CI: 1.11-1.35; p<0.05). The factors that led to higher burnout rates among non-surgeons physicians vs. surgeon physicians were: increased time spent on the EHR (31.5 hours for non-surgeon physicians vs. 23.7 hours per week for surgeon physicians), extended periods spent on administrative tasks (3.5 hours for primary care physicians vs. 2.1 hours for surgeons per week), and decreased compensation ($407,000 for surgeons to $334,000 for non-surgeon physicians). Subjective measures also showed those in medicine tend to feel less respected compared to those in surgery.

Conclusion: 

There is a clear difference between burnout rates among physicians in surgery and medicine. Determining the causes for this difference will better allow us to implement solutions to help reduce burnout rates among non-surgeon physicians.

Funding:

none