The Relationship Between Burnout and Health Professionals' Creativity, Method, and Organization.

BACKGROUND: This research focuses on problems relating to creativity and problem-solving capacity faced by a specific group of professionals, as they relate to worker burnout, which is prevalent in a large number of work environments. OBJECTIVES: Our hypothesis was that creative people who follow method and order are less likely to suffer from burnout. Our objective was to demonstrate that health professionals working in surgery who are creative, methodical, and orderly have lower levels of burnout compared to others. DESIGN: A correlational, analytical, and cross-sectional study with 70 health professionals working in surgery. METHODS: A random sample of health professionals who worked in surgery at the Hospital Universitario de La Princesa in Madrid, Spain from 2011 to 2014 were studied. The variables considered in the study were: gender, age, profession, creativity score, method and order score, and burnout score. Measurement tools were CREA: creative intelligence (Corbalán & Martinez, 2003), MO2: method and order (Seisdedos, 1994), and the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), a test of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and personal accomplishment (Maslach, 1981), all of which were validated for the Spanish population. RESULTS: Our data indicate that a worker's age influences his/her capacity to work with method and order, and that workers with emotional exhaustion (a basic feature of burnout) have lower scores in method and order. Greater emotional exhaustion and greater depersonalization were related to lower personal accomplishment and greater burnout. CONCLUSION: people who work with method and order are less likely to suffer from burnout. We did not find a direct relationship between creativity and method and order or between creativity and burnout.

Risk of hearing impairment in pediatric liver transplant recipients: a single center study.

As survival rates following liver transplantation have increased, health care providers must assess the impact of transplantation on dimensions other than traditional medical measures. Hearing impairment may adversely impact social, emotional, cognitive, academic, and speech and language development. We hypothesized that children who undergo liver transplantation are at risk for hearing impairment due to exposure to ototoxic drugs. We conducted a review of 74 children who had undergone liver transplantation between December 1996 and September 2000 at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. Hearing was assessed at discharge by an audiologist using age and developmentally appropriate techniques. The principal outcome measure was sensorineural hearing impairment. Independent variables were age at transplantation, United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) status at transplantation, primary diagnosis, post-transplant length of hospital stay, days of treatment with aminoglycosides, and days of treatment with loop diuretics. Eleven of 74 children (15%) had sensorineural hearing loss, of whom four had severe to profound hearing loss. Multivariate analyses showed that the adjusted relative risk for hearing loss in patients with hepatoblastoma was 66 and that there was a 5% increase risk for hearing loss for each additional day of hospitalization. Age at transplantation, UNOS status, and days of treatment with loop diuretics or aminoglycosides did not achieve significance in the model. Sensorineural hearing impairment occurs in a subset of pediatric patients following liver transplantation. Patients with hepatoblastoma or those who experience prolonged hospitalization after transplantation are at increased risk. Our observations are of particular importance for pediatric liver transplant recipients since the median age at transplantation is 12-18 months, a critical period for language acquisition.