[Burnout in Intensive Care]

Abstract

Both acute crises and chronically incriminating circumstances in people's lives may lead to their being afflicted by psychological and somatic ailments. "Burnout" has been coined and established as the term for chronic occupational strain. Many professions claim to be extraordinarily affected by burnout, amongst others physicians and nurses, especially those working in anaesthesiology and critical care. Usually assessed with the Maslach Burnout Inventary, the prevalence of moderate or severe burnout in these areas is estimated at about 30 % amongst nurses and about 40 % to 50 % amongst physicians. Both individual characteristics of those afflicted and occupational factors - as well as their interactions - are made responsible for causing burnout. The complexity of potentially stressful impingements, though, particularly within anaesthesiology and critical care, cannot be covered by the traditional burnout-paradigm. The plethora of recommendations found in popular science may be helpful in individual cases. However, there are no evidence-based preventive or therapeutic measures yet, that would endurably mitigate the sequelae of chronic occupational strain. On the one hand, occupationally burdensome factors needed to be registered more elaborately, for instance using the "Stress-Monitor" instrument. On the other hand, an in-hospital "peer-support system" has been developed and implemented in a Munich hospital recently. Anaesthetists and intensive care physicians have formed a network that supports health care workers surmounting acute occupational strain and thus helps to prevent its chronification. Ultimately, the goal of health care workers needed to consist of establishing individual work-related strategies to adequately cope with the manifold occupational stressors in a lifelong learning process.