Work-Life Balance: Essential or Ephemeral?

Burn-out and suicide rates among physicians and scientists in academic medicine are at an all-time high and jeopardize the future of our entire profession. In the last 4 years alone, burn-out rates among physicians have increased by 25%. In a recent 2017 Medscape publication, burn-out rates in Criti...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Stephania A. Cormier (auth)
Other Authors: Andreas Schwingshackl (auth), Kanwaljeet J. S. Anand (auth)
Format: Electronic Book Chapter
Language:English
Published: Frontiers Media SA 2017
Series:Frontiers Research Topics
Subjects:
Online Access:DOAB: download the publication
DOAB: description of the publication
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!

MARC

LEADER 00000naaaa2200000uu 4500
001 doab_20_500_12854_62809
005 20210212
003 oapen
006 m o d
007 cr|mn|---annan
008 20210212s2017 xx |||||o ||| 0|eng d
020 |a 978-2-88945-254-5 
020 |a 9782889452545 
040 |a oapen  |c oapen 
024 7 |a 10.3389/978-2-88945-254-5  |c doi 
041 0 |a eng 
042 |a dc 
072 7 |a M  |2 bicssc 
100 1 |a Stephania A. Cormier  |4 auth 
700 1 |a Andreas Schwingshackl  |4 auth 
700 1 |a Kanwaljeet J. S. Anand  |4 auth 
245 1 0 |a Work-Life Balance: Essential or Ephemeral? 
260 |b Frontiers Media SA  |c 2017 
300 |a 1 electronic resource (75 p.) 
336 |a text  |b txt  |2 rdacontent 
337 |a computer  |b c  |2 rdamedia 
338 |a online resource  |b cr  |2 rdacarrier 
490 1 |a Frontiers Research Topics 
506 0 |a Open Access  |2 star  |f Unrestricted online access 
520 |a Burn-out and suicide rates among physicians and scientists in academic medicine are at an all-time high and jeopardize the future of our entire profession. In the last 4 years alone, burn-out rates among physicians have increased by 25%. In a recent 2017 Medscape publication, burn-out rates in Critical Care physicians ranked in 9th place and Pediatricians ranked 13th among 27 subspecialties. Astonishingly, over 50% of the participants reported burn-out symptoms, with clear race and gender disparities. While men generally report higher burn-out rates than women, it is important to emphasize that response rates from women in these surveys were notoriously low and may not represent the complete picture. These numbers are even more dismal for tenured academic faculty at research-extensive universities. In this group, emotional exhaustion (i.e. high burn-out) is reported at 35% with a clear association with age and lower burn-out levels in the older tenured faculty. While no gender or racial/ethnic differences were found in this particular group, higher levels of burn-out were identified in individuals with financial responsibilities beyond a spouse and child. While it is comforting to note the increasing public interest and research activities in this field, successful approaches to ameliorate the burden and consequences of physician burn-out are still inadequately developed. Academic centers increasingly offer some type of work-life balance program to their employees but, unfortunately, these programs are frequently adopted from corporate business models and remain largely ineffective in the academic environment. It should be evident to most administrators that the stressors of academic clinicians and scientists substantially differ from those of corporate employees. Based on these observations and over 75 years of combined experience in academic medicine amongst the three editors of this Research Topic, we collected 26 manuscripts from 22 authors at different career stages and different genders, ethnicities, marital status and subspecialties to identify and stratify common and specific stressors and therapeutic approaches to ameliorate burn-out and achieve work-life balance in academic medicine. We are confident that each reader will identify with at least one, if not several, of the authors' opinions, experiences and approaches to attain greater work-life balance and thereby avoid the consequences of burn-out in modern academic medicine. 
540 |a Creative Commons  |f https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/  |2 cc  |4 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 
546 |a English 
650 7 |a Medicine  |2 bicssc 
653 |a stress 
653 |a work-life balance 
653 |a Well-being 
653 |a Health 
653 |a academic 
653 |a Family 
653 |a physician 
653 |a Suicide 
653 |a Career 
653 |a lifestyle 
856 4 0 |a www.oapen.org  |u https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/4020/work-life-balance-essential-or-ephemeral  |7 0  |z DOAB: download the publication 
856 4 0 |a www.oapen.org  |u https://directory.doabooks.org/handle/20.500.12854/62809  |7 0  |z DOAB: description of the publication