Health and Healthcare

These Are the Doctors Most Likely to Suffer Burnout

Douglas A. McIntyre

Published: June 6, 2022 12:39 pm

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a devasting period for many physicians. Some have had to treat seriously ill patients infected by the virus. Some of these have died. COVID-19 has killed over a million Americans, many of whom have died in hospitals. Other doctors have had to evaluate them in emergency rooms. During the worst of the pandemic, a percentage of these patients stayed in emergency rooms until beds were available.

Other doctors have retired or been forced to abandon their practices. Those who do procedures like plastic surgery were not able to see patients at all. Some doctors simply ran out of money.

Some doctors and other health professionals have left medicine because of burnout. Merriam Webster defines this as “exhaustion of physical or emotional strength or motivation usually as a result of prolonged stress or frustration.”

Medscape’s recently released  Physician Burnout & Depression Report 2022: Stress, Anxiety, and Anger report covered doctors in 29 specialties. The research was based on data from 13,000 physicians. The information was taken from research done between June 29 and September 26 of last year.

Beckers Hospital Review points out that “Emergency medicine physicians have the highest rates of burnout among all physician specialties, according to a Medscape’s 2022 Physician Burnout and Depression report.” The burnout rate among these doctors was an extraordinary 60%. This was followed by critical care doctors at 56%.

These are the burnout rates of 29 physician specialties: