High engagement in patients’ health-related social needs increases physician burnout
Key takeaways:
- Women and transgender women physicians reported high engagement in addressing patients’ health-related social needs.
- Black or African American physicians also reported high engagement.
Increased engagement in patients’ health-related social needs appeared associated with an increased likelihood for burnout among a cohort of physicians, according to a study.
Researchers call for thorough assessment of the potential unintended consequences of physicians’ engagement in addressing health-related social needs on their well-being.
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‘Understudied’
“Previous research suggests that a greater capacity of health care organizations to address patients’ health-related social needs is associated with lower physician burnout. However, individual physician-level engagement in addressing health-related social needs has not been fully characterized, and its association with physician burnout remains understudied,” Masami Tabata-Kelly, MBA, MA, doctoral-candidate at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University, and colleagues wrote.
For this reason, investigators set out to characterize physicians’ engagement in addressing health-related social needs and examine its association with burnout by gathering data from the 2022 Association of American Medical Colleges National Sample Survey of Physicians, which measured diverse physician workforce characteristics.
Physician burnout served as the primary outcome.
Burnout rates
The study included 5,447 physicians (mean age, 50.9 years).
Overall, 67.5% of physicians reported any engagement in addressing health-related social needs, including 33.2% who reported low to moderate health-related social needs engagement and 34.3% reporting high health-related social needs engagement.
Researchers found that women and transgender women physicians reported more engagement in addressing health-related social needs (37.8%) compared with genderqueer or other physicians (31.3%), and men and transgender men (32.2%; P = .004).
Black or African American (41.4%) physicians also reported high engagement in addressing health-related social needs.
Results showed that 34.3% of physicians reported high engagement in patients’ health-related social needs.
Researchers observed an association between low to moderate (adjusted OR = 1.33; 95% CI, 1.03-1.72) and high (adjusted OR = 1.72; 95% CI, 1.39-2.27) engagement in patients’ health-related social needs and high burnout rates.
‘Minority tax’
“The findings of this study suggest that physicians from historically marginalized communities are more frequently addressing health-related social needs,” the researchers wrote. “Specifically, high engagement in addressing health-related social needs was observed among physicians identifying as women or transgender women, those reporting Black or African American or other race and ethnicity, international medical graduates and those who frequently used non-English languages in patient communication. From the perspective of race-conscious professionalism, this could possibly be explained by intrinsic factors, with physicians from certain racial and ethnic groups potentially feeling a stronger commitment to addressing health-related social needs.”
They concluded that the study’s findings “add an additional layer to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in medicine by critically considering the ‘minority tax’ — the extra responsibilities that historically marginalized physicians often experience.”
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