A Study Of Medical Workers Burnout And Influencing Factors During The COVID-19 Pandemic

Objective: To survey the status quo of burnout among medical workers during the COVID-19 pandemic,analyze the influencing factors of job burnout,and to explore the mediating effect of psychological flexibility,self-efficacy and emotional labor between personality and job burnout among medical workers,and provide a theoretical basis for alleviating the burnout situation of medical workers under major public health events.Methods: In this study,with a convenience stratified random sampling of 600 medical workers,including 200 each of doctors,nurses and managers,was selected from two tertiary grade A hospital in Dalian during May 2021 and July 2021.The survey tools included the self-designed general information questionnaire,the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire-Revised,short Scale for Chinese(EPQ-RSC),Maslach Burnout Inventory-General Survey(MBI-GS),General Self-efficacy Scale,the Emotional Labor Scale and Acceptance and Action Questionnaire II.Epidata3.1,SPSS25.0 and Mplus8.0 were used to manage and analyze the data,and descriptive analysis,one-way ANOVA,multi-factor analysis and structural equation model were used to analysis the data.Results: 1.The incidence of job burnout among medical workers during the COVID-19 pandemic accounted for 78.8%,of which mild,moderate,and severe burnout accounted for 31.0%,29.9% and 17.9%,respectively.Among the three groups,nurses had the highest burnout rate of 84.7%.Medical workers had the highest detection rate of 69.6% for the dimension of reduced personal accomplishment.2.The univariate analysis showed that there were significant differences in the scores of medical workers’ job burnout in eight aspects: age,education,type of occupation,type of hospital to which they belonged,length of service,professional title,presence of night shifts and average monthly income(P<0.05).3.The correlation analysis showed that there were significant positive correlations between psychoticism personality,neuroticism,AAQ-Ⅱ and burnout dimensions in medical workers(P < 0.01);the scores of extraversion and self-efficacy were significantly negatively correlated with the scores of burnout dimensions(P<0.05);the score of emotional exhaustion was significantly positively correlated with the scores of emotion diversity and surface acting(r=0.118,P<0.01;r=0.440,P<0.01);the score of cynicism dimension was significantly positively correlated with the score of surface acting(r=0.310,P<0.01)and negatively correlated with the scores of other emotional labor dimensions(P<0.01);the score of reduced personal accomplishment was significantly negatively correlated with the scores of emotional labor dimensions(P<0.01);the score of self-efficacy was significantly negatively correlated with the score of AAQ-Ⅱ(r=-0.090,P<0.05)and positively correlated with the scores of emotional labor dimensions(P < 0.01);the score of AAQ-Ⅱ was significantly positively correlated with the score of surface acting(P<0.01)and negatively correlated with the scores of emotional labor dimensions(r=0.242,P<0.01).4.The multiple linear regression results showed that after controlling for the confounding factors of age,education,type of occupation,type of hospital to which they belonged,length of service,professional title,presence of night shifts and average monthly income,neuroticism,self-efficacy,emotion diversity,surface acting and psychological flexibility were the main influencing factors affecting the emotional exhaustion dimension;psychoticism,self-efficacy,emotion diversity,surface acting and psychological flexibility were the main influencing factors affecting the cynicism dimension;neuroticism,self-efficacy,deep acting and psychological flexibility were the main influencing factors affecting reduced personal accomplishment dimension.5.The analysis of mediating effects showed that psychological flexibility played significant mediating effects between psychoticism personality and emotional exhaustion,cynicism(β=0.320;β=0.318);emotional labor played significant mediating effects between psychoticism personality and personal accomplishment(β=-0.373).Psychological flexibility played significant mediating effects between extroverted personality and emotional exhaustion,cynicism(β=-0.141;β=-0.182);self-efficacy played significant mediating effects between extroverted personality and personal accomplishment(β=0.070).Self-efficacy,psychological flexibility and emotional labor played significant mediating effects between neuroticism personality and burnout.Among them,psychological flexibility had the largest mediating effect between neuroticism personality and emotional exhaustion,cynicism(β=0.224;β=0.265);emotional labor had the largest mediating effect between neuroticism personality and personal accomplishment(β=-0.117).Conclusions: 1.The detection rate of job burnout among medical workers under the COVID-19 pandemic was relatively high,and the degree of burnout was mainly mild to moderate burnout,and the detection rate of reduced personal accomplishment was the highest.2.Age,education,type of occupation,type of hospital to which they belonged,length of service,professional title,presence of night shifts and average monthly income were the influencing factors of job burnout of medical workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.3.Medical workers’ personality traits,psychological flexibility,general self-efficacy,emotional labor,and job burnout were correlated with each other.4.Psychological flexibility and emotional labor play multiple mediating effects on the relationship between psychoticism and burnout;psychological flexibility and general self-efficacy play multiple mediating effects on the relationship between extroverted and burnout;psychological flexibility,self-efficacy and emotional labor play multiple mediating effects between neuroticism and burnout.So targeted measures should be taken for medical workers with different personality traits and different symptoms of burnout.