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Demographic and situational variations in levels of burnout in European mental health services: a comparative study.

2007; Radcliffe Publishing; Volume: 4; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

2049-548X

Peter Ryan, Marta Anczewska, Heli Laijarvi, Czesław Czabała, Robert Hill, Anna Kurek,

Stress and Burnout Research

This paper reviews the demographic and situationalvariations in levels of occupational burnout, asmeasured by the Maslach Burnout Inventory,among community and inpatient staff in six Europeanmental health services, located in Aarhus andStorstrom in Denmark, Cambridge in the UK, Bodoin Norway, Tampere in Finland and Warsaw inPoland. The overall study design was a time serieswith baseline and follow-up at six and 12 months.A total of 414 members of staff were assessed in thesix settings: 205 in inpatient facilities and 209 in thecommunity. To calculate the influence of sociodemographicfactors in relation to levels of burnout,a factor analysis was carried out. Each factor wasanalysed twice. There were no statistically significantdifferences regarding emotional exhaustion.Depersonalisation (DP) was higher in inpatient settings(1.73, standard error (SE) 0.04) than incommunity locations (1.62, SE 0.04). The lowestscores for DP for inpatient settings were observed inAarhus (1.59, SE 0.08) and in Storstrom (1.65, SE0.08). Regarding personal accomplishment (PA)the statistically significant differenceswere observedbetween Warsaw, which scored high in PA (39.92,SE 3.63), and Storstrom (76.36, SE 4.60), whichscored low. Staff who had previously experiencedrelevant prior training on occupational stress reductionscored significantly lower in emotionalexhaustion (EE) (3.75, SE 0.13) than those withno prior exposure to relevant training (4.07, SE0.07). The study also indicated that men in the studyscored significantly higher on DP (1.75, SE 0.05)than did women (1.60, SE 0.03). This may beexplicable in terms of men being exposed to higherlevels of violence than women.