Fighting burnout

Volunteering may help prevent burnout among health care workers and students, according to a recently published study co-authored by an OUWB medical student.

“Does volunteering decrease burnout? Healthcare professional and student perspectives on burnout and volunteering,” was published in the journal Frontiers in Public Health.

Lead author on the study was M2 Tai Metzger.

The study found that volunteering may be useful in preventing burnout, though it might not be as effective in battling the condition for those who already feel burned out.

“The aim of this study was to understand what motivates (health care) workers and students to volunteer in their community as well as examine how volunteering relates to burnout,” the study states. “These findings can help health organizations better meet the needs of (health care) workers, as well as provide insights for (nonprofits) that rely on volunteer professionals.”

Why volunteer?

Burnout is a huge issue in medicine — and it’s become worse in recent years.

Newly published research co-written by the American Medical Association shows how the COVID-19 pandemic magnified long-standing issues that have accelerated the U.S. physician burnout rate.

At the end of 2021, nearly 63% of physicians reported symptoms of burnout, up from 38% in 2020. Research shows that large-scale change is needed to address the physician burnout crisis.

“Reducing burnout is essential to high-quality patient care and a sustainable health system,” the organization states on its website. “By measuring and responding to physician burnout where it exists, solutions and interventions can be identified and developed at the systems level.”

AMA suggests several possible solutions:

• Assess underlying drivers of burnout.
• Understand unique challenges to physician and care team well-being.
• Reduce drivers of stress within an organization.
• Proactively initiate programs (such as wellness or peer-to-peer networking) and infrastructure that support and promote well-being.

The study led by Metzger suggests that volunteering might be another way to deal with burnout.

Researchers based their findings on more than 40 health care workers and students who volunteered at community health fairs. The participants were interviewed and/or took the Oldenburg Burnout Inventory (OLBI) — a self-report measure that assesses the severity of work-related burnout based on responses to 16 questions.

“The fact that none of the volunteers interviewed in this study had high levels of burnout is consistent with (the) reciprocal relationship between burnout and volunteering,” the study states.

Volunteering is a big part of the culture at OUWB. “Partner with, and serve, our communities,” is part of the school’s 2022-25 Strategic Plan.

There are numerous opportunities for students, staff, and faculty to get involved: the annual Day of Service typically held in August; National Make a Difference Day in October; through organizations like Street Medicine Oakland; at popular sport and music events; and the Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service, just to name a few.

There are many other opportunities, too, through the OUWB Center for Community Engagement that partners with numerous community organizations.

People volunteer for various reasons.

“Students volunteered for professional development while health care professionals cited a desire for a change in their day-to-day work as a reason to volunteer,” the study states.

“Both students and health professionals often volunteered because they wanted to make a difference, it made them feel good, and/or they felt a responsibility to volunteer.”

Brian Felice, M.D., is an emergency medicine physician at Corewell Health, and medical director of Street Medicine Oakland.

He recently shared why he volunteers with Street Medicine Oakland.

“As physicians, we’re looked at as leaders, and I think that it’s of utmost importance that we represent that well in the community,” he said. “I was born and raised in this community, so I feel connected…it’s important that we speak up for our patients and advocate for them while they’re in the hospital and outside of brick-and-mortar clinical settings.”

Fighting burnout

Metzger started working on the volunteering and burnout study while still an undergrad at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA).

He and several of the co-authors were working with a nonprofit called Vietnamese Community Health (VCH) at UCLA.

As Metzger put it, “we had access to a lot of data and providers…and wanted to see if volunteering could influence burnout.”

“The hope was to come up with a good way to help fight or reduce burnout that physicians and other health professionals face,” he said.

Metzger’s team continued working on the study throughout his first year of medical school at OUWB.

“Our main findings were that volunteering helped prevent burnout,” he said. “Especially because it is different from day-to-day routines…it’s a nice way to diversify for health care workers.”

But, he said, the study found that engaging in volunteerism when already burned out isn’t a good idea.

“Volunteering isn’t likely to help burnout for those who area already feeling it because it would just be added work, time, and stress.”

The hope, said Metzger, is that the findings from the study will help influence views on volunteering and inspire others to look at it to help combat burnout.

“(Health care) organizations might consider promoting volunteering as a possible method of preventing burnout and exhaustion among their employees so that they can gain experiences outside of their usual work and rekindle their original motivations for entering the health care field by helping those in need,” the study concluded.

Further, it stated, that “universities and health professional schools might consider formally integrating volunteer experiences into curricula to both prevent burnout as well as to provide meaningful, educational, and professionally enriching experiences outside of the classroom.”