Burnout, the permanent stress at work, affects 52% of doctors and 45% of nurses who work in internal medicine hospital departments, which alone absorb a fifth of all hospitalizations in Italy. A threat to their health but also to that of the assisted, given that working when one is under pressure and tired means greatly increasing the chances of getting distracted and making mistakes.
It is estimated that errors in the lane are 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.
Both for doctors and nurses, the incidence of stress 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 influence of burnout on occupational diseases is a fact now established by the scientific literature», says Francesco Dentali, president of Fadoi. «The risk of myocardial infarction and other coronary adverse events is in fact about two and a half times higher in those in burnout, while the threats of abortion range from 20% when the 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.
Not feeling good in the workplace can lead to drastic choices: almost 50% of doctors and nurses under stress plan to quit within the year.
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 nurses it gives 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 can have run into more than one error during the year.
However, the Fadoi research also contains a positive and unprecedented reverse side of the coin: both 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 the 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».