A decade-old study about burnout among junior doctors is getting a refresh, and the initial results are promising.
Junior doctors may be more optimistic about their working lives than they were a decade ago, with improvements in overtime payments, parental leave and workplace expectations helping to ease some of the pressures that have traditionally contributed to burnout.
But long working hours, uncertainty around specialist training pathways and a lack of support remained significant concerns, according to GP Rebekah Hoffman.
Dr Hoffman revisited her study into junior doctor burnout, published in the Australian Journal of General Practice almost a decade ago.
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Talking anecdotally to her medical students, she told TMR she had expected burnout might be worse than 10 years ago.
“If you look back, we have AI, we’ve got telehealth, we’ve got a whole pandemic that’s happened,” Dr Hoffman said.
But so far she was pleasantly surprised.
“They’re actually quite optimistic about the future, about what’s happening next,” she said.
As part of her original research, she found that stress for junior doctors was common and the causes was multifactorial.
“They were more likely to be feeling stressed when their expectations regarding workplace support were not met and when they believed they were practising beyond the level of their own abilities,” the study found.
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However, this time, she found that certain changes such as increased overtime payment and even overtime back pay had made a difference.
“They really feel like they’re now encouraged to submit for overtime, and that overtime is going to get paid. It sounds like small, insignificant things, but they really have made a big difference to the junior doctors,” Dr Hoffman said.
For general practitioners, she believed AI had helped reduce the rate of burnout.
“For me it means that I can actually engage with my patient better because I’m not so worried about my documentation and making sure that that’s contemporaneous that I’m actually able to have a conversation with my patient, and I know that my notes are better as a result,” she said.
There was even more potential for impact as hospital doctors weren’t using AI much at all.
“They really haven’t had any significant experience around AI or increase in technology. Some of them are still using paper-based notes…
“So the potential of that and what they could be moving into is enormous,” she said.
Hospital doctors she had spoken to were struggling in other areas. In particular, the uncertainty about the wait to get onto speciality training.
“(They are) struggling around the unknown, not knowing how long it’s going to take to get onto training, not knowing how many trainees are going to be accepted each year.
“So definitely needing some more clarity around timeframes because they’re often waiting up to a decade to even get on to specialty training programs,” she said.
Dr Hoffman also continued to hear about other key burnout factors such as long working hours and patient numbers, with more stress and burnout reported when there weren’t rest breaks after long shifts.
Dr Hoffman said junior doctors often acknowledged that medicine was a hard job, but getting support from their seniors made all the difference.
“Feeling that they can ask for help is still something that continues to come up,” she said.
Dr Hoffman was still looking for junior doctors to participate in her research, specifically:
- GP registrars enrolled in AGPT, or FSP, GPT1–GPT4, or new fellow, at any postgraduate year
- Hospital junior doctors – PGY1–PGY5 (interns, RMOs, registrars, including unaccredited registrars)
