Addressing physician quality of life: understanding the relationship between burnout, work engagement, compassion fatigue and satisfaction

Burnout and compassion fatigue are now recognized as occupational hazards associated with the medical profession. Interestingly, burnout and compassion fatigue do not occur in every physician and many continue to find joy, meaning and satisfaction in their work despite its challenges and stressors. Our study looked at the relationship between burnout, work engagement, compassion fatigue and satisfaction amongst doctors. We also studied the relationship between these and four measureable intrinsic human factors; self-efficacy, resilient personality type, sense of gratitude and work calling. Our study found that 37% of the doctors were at high risk of burnout and 7.5% were at high risk of compassion fatigue and only 3.3% and 1.5% were at low risk of burnout and compassion fatigue respectively. Only 2.7% and 0.3% had high rates of work engagement and compassion satisfaction respectively. There was a mild but significant negative correlation between burnout and engagement, and a poor negative correlation between compassion fatigue and satisfaction. Only intrinsic human factors were significantly correlated to burnout, work engagement, compassion fatigue and satisfaction. Our preliminary findings suggest that certain intrinsic factors increase work engagement and compassion satisfaction amongst doctors. As some of these intrinsic factors also appear to buffer against burnout and compassion fatigue, increasing work engagement and compassion satisfaction not only builds individual resilience against burnout and compassion fatigue but may also lead to improvement in overall health, professional quality of life and career longevity for doctors.