Suffer from burnout syndrome, that set of symptoms determined by a permanent state of stress with which they have to live their work, 52% of doctors and 45% of nurses who work in hospital internal medicine departments, those who alone absorb a fifth of all hospitalizations in Italy. A threat to their health but also to that of the patients, given that working when in burnout means greatly increasing the chances of making a health mistake, which in Italy would be around 100,000 a year.
The photograph of doctors and nurses is provided by the survey conducted by Fadoi, the Federation of hospital internists, on a representative sample of over two thousand health professionals and presented in Milan at the 28th National Congress of the Federation.
In total, 49.6% of the sample declare themselves in “burnout”, but the percentage rises to 52% when it comes to doctors, to fall back to 45% in the case of nurses. And in both cases the incidence is more than double among women, where there is still the difficulty of combining working time with that absorbed by children and the family in general.
The age factor also influences the state of chronic stress, given that under the age of thirty the percentage of those in burnout drops to 30.5%. The fact is that by projecting the more than significant data of internal medicines onto the world universe of our public health professionals, we have over 56,000 doctors and 125,500 nurses working in burnout. And that for this reason they run into some inevitable mistakes. A study conducted by the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Mayo Clinic of Minnesota found at least one major error during the year in 36% of burnout white coats. Percentage that projected on the total of our doctors from a total of over 20 thousand serious errors.
Similar speech for nurses. Here a series of international studies collected by Fnopi, the Federation of Nursing Orders, estimates that 57% of more or less serious clinical errors are committed over the course of a year. Given that applied to the number of public nurses operating in Italy in burnout by another 71,500 errors in the assistance phase for a total of at least 92 thousand, certainly a few more considering that the same operator may have run into more than one error during the year.
“The influence of burnout on occupational diseases is now a fact established by the scientific literature”, says Francesco Dentali, President of Fadoi. “The risk of myocardial infarction and other adverse coronary events is in fact about two and a half times higher in those in burnout, while threats of abortion range from 20% when working hours do not exceed 40 hours per week going up down to 35% when you get to 70. An event that is less and less rare with the chronic undersizing of hospital organic plants”, adds Dentali. And nearly 50% of burnout doctors and nurses plan to quit within the year.
However, the Fadoi research also contains a positive and unprecedented reverse side of the coin: the vast majority of doctors and nurses “feel that they have effectively addressed the problems of their patients”.
“Health care work in the age of burnout harms both the health of citizens and that of doctors and nurses”, comments in turn the president of the Fadoi Foundation, Dario Manfellotto. “A problem – he continues – all the more felt in internal medicine departments, which an anachronistic and antiquated ministerial classification with code 26 still defines as low-intensity care, when it is enough to scroll through the list of medical records to understand that ours are patients complexes that require medium-high intensity care”.
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