Dr. Harris on burnout among urology trainees

In this video, Andrew M. Harris, MD, highlights the background and key findings from the study, “Burnout in Urological Education: An In-Depth Study of Residents and Fellows in the 2021 AUA Census.” Harris is the chief of urology at the Lexington VA Health System, an associate professor at the University of Kentucky, and the chair of the Workforce Task Force and a member of the Quality Improvement and Patient Safety Committee for the American Urological Association.

Video Transcript:

Could you describe the background for this study?

I appreciate the opportunity to be with you and to talk about a topic very important to the Workforce Task Force from the American Urological Association, and that is burnout. [One of] our more recent papers was [published] in the Journey or Urology on the practicing work force post-residency, and we saw a decent amount of burnout. Some of the trends we saw in the most recent burnout paper compared to 2016 is that the gender gap has widened quite a bit. We also see burnout more in our younger urologists. So, we wanted to take a look at the trainee population. That's a more vulnerable population. They don't have a lot of control over their schedule, and they're also a protected population. So, we wanted to understand, are the risk factors for burnout, the burnout percentages, similar among trainees compared to post-trainee urologists? And also, is the risk the same for all trainees? Is it different if they're younger, different if they're older, earlier in training, later in training? Does it matter based on their sex? Does it matter if they have call rooms or meal plans or if they have kids during residency? Anything that we could figure out, we wanted to take a shot at learning to see how we can fight burnout if indeed the percentages were similar among trainees as they are in post-trainee urologists where we know burnout is an issue.

What were the key findings?

Interestingly, the trainees, when you look at residents as a conglomerate, experienced burnout at a higher rate than post-trainee urologists. So, our post-training urologists are in the mid 30% range of burnout. Trainees, specifically residents, about 48% of them that responded to the survey [and] met the criteria for burnout, and about 33% of fellows. What is interesting about that 48% is it's much higher than in our post-trainee, practicing urologists. But even when you break it down by year, we start to see some differences. And really, our PGY-2s and PGY-3s are at a higher risk of burnout when compared to the other year levels. We can see them [have] up to 60% to 70% [rate of] burnout compared to say, PGY-4s, which is much lower.

This transcription has been edited for clarity.