Employees with burnout had most symptoms, compared with those who experienced only exhaustion, disengagement from work or no burnout, and the result underlines the importance of actions taken to prevent and combat burnout.

Peer-support groups using a problem-based method could be a useful and comparatively inexpensive tool in alleviating work-related stress and burnout.

Psychometric properties, particularly predictive validity, of scales in the General Nordic Questionnaire for Psychological and Social Factors at Work (QPS(Nordic)) were assessed. The analysis is confined to the scales in the QPS(Nordic,) and 24 of the 26 scales are included. A large group of Swedish county council employees (n= 3,976; response rate = 65%) participated in a study and were given the QPS(Nordic). Register data for long-term sick leave (>90 days), with diagnosis, were used for predictive analysis. The following main results were obtained: Reliability was generally satisfactory, confirmatory factor analysis indicated good fit, concurrent validity was good, some less often investigated organizational variables predicted sickness absence, and scales were differentially associated with absence due to psychiatric and musculoskeletal disorders. In conclusion, the psychometric testing of the QPS(Nordic) so far suggests that it is a good instrument for assessing health-related factors at work.

The aim of this study was to search for constellations of work characteristics that discriminate people who experience burnout from those who do not, and also from those who score high in exhaustion but not in disengagement, and vice versa. The study is based on data from 3,719 employees in a County Council in Sweden. Discriminant analysis revealed that four burnout categories (nonburnout, disengaged, exhausted, and burnout), related in different ways to selfreported work characteristics. The proportions of respondents with overtime, sickness absence, and sickness presence were higher in the burnout and the exhausted groups compared with the nonburnout group. The most common professions in the burnout group were, unexpectedly, dental nurses, secretaries, and service staff.

Prolonged stress (≥ six months) may cause a condition which has been named exhaustion disorder (ED) with ICD-10 code F43.8. ED is characterised by exhaustion, cognitive problems, poor sleep and reduced tolerance to further stress. ED can cause long term disability and depressive symptoms may develop. The aim was to construct and evaluate a self-rating scale, the Karolinska Exhaustion Disorder Scale (KEDS), for the assessment of ED symptoms. A second aim was to examine the relationship between self-rated symptoms of ED, depression, and anxiety using KEDS and the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HAD). Items were selected based on their correspondence to criteria for ED as formulated by the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare (NBHW), with seven response alternatives in a Likert-format. Self-ratings performed by 317 clinically assessed participants were used to analyse the scale’s psychometric properties. KEDS consists of nine items with a scale range of 0–54. Receiver operating characteristics analysis demonstrated that a cut-off score of 19 was accompanied by high sensitivity and specificity (each above 95%) in the discrimination between healthy subjects and patients with ED. Reliability was satisfactory and confirmatory factor analysis revealed that ED, depression and anxiety are best regarded as different phenomena. KEDS may be a useful tool in the assessment of symptoms of Exhaustion Disorder in clinical as well as research settings. There is evidence that the symptom clusters of ED, anxiety and depression, respectively, reflect three different underlying dimensions.