Dear Editor,
As final year medical students in London, we read Ye Kyung Song’s article on medical student burnout with great interest and would like to offer our perspective on the matter [1]. Although we agree with her conclusion that the high prevalence of burnout in medical students indicates system-wide issues, we would argue that there is a role for screening personality during medical school.
Medical students with certain personality traits may be more likely to experience burnout, for example those with low extroversion, high neuroticism and high conscientiousness [2]. From our personal experience, we feel that more neurotic medical students are overall less satisfied with medicine as a career, contributing to elevated stress levels. Our observations are echoed by a prospective 12-year longitudinal study on medical school applicants and students which found that personality, including levels of neuroticism, not only correlates to but also has a causative effect on stress, satisfaction and burnout post-graduation [3].
We therefore propose that medical schools carry out a Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO PI-R) during the first year induction at medical school in order to identify students at higher risk of burnout, followed by the Maslach Burnout Inventory at the end of every year to determine actual levels of burnout. The NEO PI-R tool has previously been used to predict burnout based on personality traits [4, 5] whilst the Maslach Burnout Inventory has been widely used and shown to be reliable at determining actual burnout levels [6, 7].
The data obtained from the questionnaires would allow for targeted provisions of psychosocial training to build up protective traits and programs to improve coping and stress management, thereby preventing or reducing the occurrence of burnout in medical students. We suggest this on the basis that such methods have been previously recommended for addressing burnout in physicians [8].
References
Song Y. “This Isn’t Being a Doctor.”—qualitative inquiry into the existential dimensions of medical student burnout. Medical Science Educator. 2020
Tyssen R, Dolatowski F, Røvik J, Thorkildsen R, Ekeberg Ø, Hem E, et al. Personality traits and types predict medical school stress: a six-year longitudinal and nationwide study. Med Educ. 2007;41:781–7.
McManus I, Keeling A, Paice E. Stress, burnout and doctors’ attitudes to work are determined by personality and learning style: a twelve year longitudinal study of UK medical graduates. BMC Med. 2004;2.
Cano-García F, Padilla-Muñoz E, Carrasco-Ortiz M. Personality and contextual variables in teacher burnout. Personal Individ Differ. 2005;38:929–40.
Divinakumar K, Bhat P, Prakash J, Srivastava K. Personality traits and its correlation to burnout in female nurses. Ind Psychiatry J. 2019;28:24–8.
Coker A, Omoluabi P. Validation of Maslach Burnout Inventory. IFE PsychologIA. 2009;17.
Taylor C, Graham J, Potts H, Richards M, Ramirez A. Changes in mental health of UK hospital consultants since the mid-1990s. Lancet. 2005;366:742–4.
Patel R, Sekhri S, Bhimanadham N, Imran S, Hossain S. A review on strategies to manage physician burnout. Cureus. 2019;.
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Suseanu, AI., Butt, O. & Pai, H. Letter to the Editor in Response to “This Isn’t Being a Doctor”. Med.Sci.Educ. 30, 1343 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40670-020-01053-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40670-020-01053-5