Background: The term “burnout syndrome” was first introduced in the late 90s to describe the psychological and physical exhaustion among workers caused by chronic and repetitive exposure to occupational stressors. Among students, it can be defined by three dimensions characterized by emotional exhaustion (EE), cynicism, and reduced personal accomplishment (PA). Previous literature suggests that burnout may slowly evolve and develop over the years throughout medical schools. We aimed to evaluate the prevalence of burnout syndrome and depression among medical students, as well as their determinants.
Methods: Data were collected from medical students of second-sixth year during the academic year of 2021- 2022 at King Abdulaziz University (KAU). A self-administered questionnaire formulated based on the information provided by the Maslach Burnout Inventory, Raosoft sample size calculator, and Statistical Package for the Social Sciences Statistics version 21 were used for data collection, sampling, and data analysis.
Results: A total of 263 students were analyzed. The overall prevalence of burnout was 26.2%. Almost twothirds of the participants were females 62.4%. Female gender has prevalence of 32.9% compared to males 15.2% with p value of 0.001. The mean SD scores of the EE was 23.8 10.6, depersonalization (DP) 14.4 9.2 and PA 25.9 10.7 EE were prevalent among 33.5% of students, and DP was high among 56.7% of them. PA was low among 73.4% of students.
Conclusion: This study proved that students in KAUH demonstrated significantly lower prevalence of burnout among its medical students, with a percentage of 26.2 only. Although statistically significant, this number is incomparable with previous similar studies done in different regions of Saudi Arabia. Burnout has been shown to be strongly associated with the female gender, and higher prevalence was noted among clinical years students compared to preclinical ones. These aforementioned findings suggest that burnout slowly evolves and develops over the years throughout medical school.
Key words: Burnout, medical student.
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