Assessing burnout: The organizational and individual perspective

Recognition of burnout is imperative before persons suffering from burnout adversely affect their colleagues and the services that their organizations provide. To do so, the health care professional must first understand the process in order to recognize the symptoms. The characteristic slow development of the condition and signs and symptoms that are guideposts to its development are discussed from a personal as well as organizational standpoint. Burnout can be recognized as a combination of emotional states: helplessness, hopelessness, disenchantment, and physical exhaustion; attitudes and behaviors, such as negativism, inflexibility, and powerlessness; and the somatic states of physical exhaustion, accident proneness, and increased susceptibility to illness. Generally there are 2 types of methods for assessing degree of burnout in an individual: subjective self-assessment and research instruments as the Maslach Burnout Inventory and the Staff Burnout Scale for Health Professionals. Organizational assessment involves 2 factors: the potential an organization has toward burning out its employees and the present level of burnout in the employees. Because burnout combines many subjective states of which most people are not proud, accurate assessment of the problem is a difficult, but necessary, step for planning intervention. If there is no assessment of the problem, then there is no accurate method of evaluating the result after the intervention is introduced. (emc)