Burnout and Satisfaction with Work-Life Balance among General Practitioners in Bulgaria during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The objective of the present study is to analyze the link between the degree of professional burnout among general practitioners in Bulgaria during a pandemic and their satisfaction with the balance between their personal lives and professional lives. A cross-sectional study was conducted during the fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic from December 2021 to January 2022 among 377 general practitioners. We identified the presence and level of burnout syndrome among GPs using V. Boyko's method for diagnostics of the severity of symptoms and the phases of formation and completion of the 'occupational burnout' process. Descriptive statistics and parametric and non-parametric tests were used for the analysis. For the significance level of the null hypothesis, we assumed that p < 0.05 at a 95% confidence interval. A total of 96.3% of the GPs had a high level of burnout during the COVID-19 pandemic. They worked more than 8 h a day (74.8%) and more than 5 days a week (69.0%). A total of 86.3% of them were not satisfied with the spare time they had and stated that they could not balance their work and personal lives (67.1%) since the pandemic was announced. A link was found between the level of professional burnout and long working hours (p = 0.022), dissatisfaction with free time (p = 0.028), and the inability to balance work and personal life (p = 0.000), as well as concerns related to safety during the pandemic (p = 0.048). Unrealistically high levels of burnout during the COVID-19 pandemic due to a disturbed work-life balance is a reason to re-evaluate health policies and involve more hospital care doctors at the frontlines to fight against severe infectious diseases. The results of this study could be used to inform policy makers, healthcare managers, and other stakeholders about the factors that have had profound impacts on GPs' stress levels during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Burnout among nurses and correctional officers.

BACKGROUND: The work of nurses and correctional officers alike has long been pointed at as among the most stressful in the world. OBJECTIVE: The primary aim was to evaluate the prevalence and level of occupational burnout among 214 hospital nurses and 201 correctional officers from Bulgaria. One of the focuses was to examine whether gender roles or occupational roles were more related to burnout. METHODS: The current work used a descriptive cross-sectional inter-occupational comparative survey design. The participation was voluntary, individually and anonymously without any financial compensation. The only qualification in the sample selection was that the employee had direct contact with patients and inmates respectively. A translated MBI-Bulgarian version was used to measure burnout. Data were entered into SPSS17.0 to carry out data analysis. RESULTS: The level of emotional exhaustion and personal accomplishment of nurses were significantly higher than that of correctional officers. Mean depersonalization score of correctional officers was significantly higher than that of nurses. Correctional officers demonstrated a higher prevalence of burnout syndrome compared with nurses. To examine whether gender is associated with burnout, Mann-Whitney U test was utilized to assess gender differences of correctional officers. Our results suggest that being male or female is not a critical determinant of burnout. CONCLUSION: Correctional officers were found to have a higher prevalence of burnout syndrome compared with nurses.

Academic Staff Satisfaction with their Work: A Cross-Sectional Study in a Medical University.

BACKGROUND: Employees' work satisfaction, combined with democratic management, are important predictors of future productivity in any organisation. AIM: The aim of this study is to investigate job satisfaction in academic staff as well as the associated working environment factors, using an original self-administered questionnaire. METHODS: A cross-sectional survey was conducted using an original standardised questionnaire. It involved 370 academic staff members at one of the five medical universities in Bulgaria. The questionnaire consists of 17 items (including occupational hazards, management style, conflict solving and demographic characteristics) rated on a 5-point Likert scale. RESULTS: The results revealed that the majority of academic staff (71.7%) works in a risky environment. Employees indicate that "mental strain", "work with chemical agents and dust" and "work with biological hazards" are the most common risk factors. Democratic leadership and cooperation are most commonly applied management styles. CONCLUSION: The instrument for the measurement of job satisfaction revealed high values of psychometric characteristics for reliability and validity. The study found a high level of satisfaction of academics with their working conditions. It is necessary to conduct similar studies periodically to detect more precisely the decrease in academic staff work satisfaction and take timely and adequate measures to improve it.

Do Personality Characteristics Constitute the Profile of Burnout-Prone Correctional Officers?

AIM: This study examined the relationship between personality characteristics and burnout syndrome among Bulgarian correctional officers. METHODS: The cross-sectional study took place through individual, voluntary and anonymous interviewing of 307 employees from three district prisons. Maslach burnout inventory, Eysenck personality questionnaire and demographic characteristics were administered. RESULTS: The personality predictors of emotional exhaustion were low emotional stability and low level of dimension extraversion. The predictors of depersonalization were high levels of neuroticism and psychoticism and low level of extraversion. CONCLUSION: This research helps to identify employees who are at risk for developing burnout as a result of their personalities. In Bulgaria, there is still no official information about studies in this area.

Adaptation and Validation of a Burnout Inventory in a Survey of the Staff of a Correctional Institution in Bulgaria.

BACKGROUND: Burnout syndrome is a phenomenon that seems to be studied globally in relation to all types of populations. The staff in the system of correctional institutions in Bulgaria, however, is oddly left out of this tendency. There is no standardized model in Bulgaria that can be used to detect possible susceptibility to professional burnout. The methods available at present only register the irreversible changes that have already set in the functioning of the individual. V. Boyko's method for burnout assessment allows clinicians to use individual approach to patients and affords easy comparability of results with data from other psychodiagnostic instruments. Adaptation of the assessment instruments to fit the specificities of a study population (linguistic, ethno-cultural, etc.) is obligatory so that the instrument could be correctly used and yield valid results. Validation is one of the most frequently used technique to achieve this. AIM: The aim of the present study was to adapt and validate V. Boyko's burnout inventory for diagnosing burnout and assessment of the severity of the burnout syndrome in correctional officers. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We conducted a pilot study with 50 officers working in the Plovdiv Regional Correction Facility by test-retest survey performed at an interval of 2 to 4 months. All participants completed the adapted questionnaire translated into Bulgarian voluntarily and anonymously. Statistical analysis was performed using SPSS v.17. RESULTS: We found a mild-to-strong statistically significant correlation (P<0.01) across all subscales between the most frequently used questionnaire for assessing the burnout syndrome, the Maslach Burnout Inventory, and the tool we propose here. The high Cronbach's α coefficient (α=0.94) and Spearman-Brown coefficient (rsb=0.86), and the low mean between-item correlation (r=0.30) demonstrated the instrument's good reliability and validity. CONCLUSION: With the validation herein presented we offer a highly reliable Bulgarian variant of Boyko's method for burnout assessment and research.

Professional burnout syndrome among correctional facility officers.

INTRODUCTION: Correctional facilities present unique work places--the employees there work in tough, demanding and hazardous working conditions, in real life-threatening environment, subjected to physical and mental fatigue, risk of infectious diseases, work in shifts, with inadequate pay, etc. The aim of this study was to find the prevalence and level of burnout syndrome among employees working in the District Prison of the town of Plovdiv. MATERIAL AND METHODS: The study included all employees that had direct contact with the inmates in the prison. We recruited 106 employees that participated in the study anonymously and voluntarily. The main instrument we used was the questionnaire designed according to the methods developed by V. Boiko, which allows identification of professional burnout syndrome in its three phases with four symptoms in each of the phases. RESULTS: We found a high prevalence of burnout syndrome among the staff in the District Prison in Plovdiv (74.53%). All three phases of burnout were found to have a high prevalence rate--the stress phase: 48.11%, the resistance phase: 66.98%, the exhaustion phase: 41.51%. The rank in the service hierarchy was found to be a predictor in the stress phase, B = 0.701, p = 0.048, Exp(B) = 2.106, 95%CI [1.00; 4.04]. The single officers (83.33% of the divorced and 55.56% of the single employees) and those of the staff that were more highly educated (78.72%) had elevated levels of burnout syndrome, and these manifested during the first 5 years of their service in the prison (77.78%). CONCLUSION: In Bulgaria at present the burnout syndrome has not been studied among employees working in correctional facilities. We found a high prevalence of the syndrome among the employees of the District Prison - Plovdiv. The younger, the single and the more educated employees had greater levels of burnout syndrome, which manifest during the first 5 years of their service. The results suggest that there is a need to develop and implement effective strategies to reduce and prevent development of burnout syndrome.