Burnout in Academic Medicine: A Peripandemic Assessment

Abstract

The impact of burnout on academic medicine has affected its 3 major missions—education, patient care, and research—in ways both similar to and dissimilar from the community practice of medicine. The authors have assessed major themes in the literature regarding burnout in health care professionals in academic medicine in the peripandemic periods—pre-, intra-, and postpandemic—to gain information on the impact of the pandemic on these perspectives. Additionally, burnout in military physicians, particularly in the military medicine academic community, was assessed to provide comparative perspectives on the factors of military training, personal resiliency, and unit cohesiveness on the development of, or resistance to, professional burnout. Overall, there are data to indicate an aggravation of burnout during the pandemic, but currently no long-term data to indicate a persistence of its effects over time on health care professionals beyond baseline prevalence identified prepandemic. Based on the assessments, recommendations are provided for future research, including clarification and standardization of the concepts of burnout, developing longitudinal studies on health care practitioner burnout status with preventive and/or mitigating interventions, and the special protection of certain professionals, including female physicians, physicians in training, and early-career faculty, including nonclinical researchers.