Burnout in the Mental Health Workforce: A Review

Abstract

There are enormous concerns regarding the recruitment, retention, training, and performance of the behavioral health workforce. Paramount among these concerns is turnover, which causes disruption in continuity of care, diminishes access to care while a position remains vacant, and poses financial hardship on the provider organization through costs related to recruitment, orientation, and training of a new hire. There is frequent mention of burnout within the literature and among behavioral health managers as a potential cause of turnover. However, there is no recent or comprehensive review of burnout that examines the evidence surrounding its validity, utility, and potential relationship to turnover. The purpose of this paper is to provide such a review by examining the construct of burnout, methodological and measurement issues, its prevalence in the mental health workforce, correlates of burnout, and interventions to decrease it. The implications for provider organizations and recommendations for future research are identified.

Does Formulation of Service Users’ Difficulties Improve Empathy in Forensic Mental Health Services?

“…However the depersonalization (DP) subscale of the Maslach Burnout Inventory ([MBI], Maslach & Jackson, 1981) was predictive in this instance. Paris and Hoge (2009) define depersonalization as an unfeeling and impersonal response toward service users, while perspective taking could be seen as the opposite: the clinicians' ability to take on the view of another person (Davis, 1983). It could be hypothesized that a clinician's ability to take the perspective of a service user (PT) may be explained or predicted by the degree to which they hold negative attitudes toward them (DP), thus explaining the predictive relationship observed in the current study.…”

The Relationship between Occupational Stress, Burnout, and Turnover Intention among Managerial Staff from a Sino‐Japanese Joint Venture in Guangzhou, China

“…Table 2 shows the scores for emotional exhaustion (EE), depersonalization (DP) and personal accomplishment (PA), which were lower than those for the overall sample of the MBI-HSS subscales 6,19) (n=1,106, mean (SD): 20.99 (10.75) for EE, 8.73 (5.89) for DP, 34.58 (7.11) for PA) from the original instrument designed for service providers in the human services field. The overall sample utilized to norm the measure (n=11,067) included individuals from the following subgroups: elementary and secondary education, postsecondary education, social services, medicine and mental health 6,23) . In our subjects, the distributions of the different levels for EE, DP and PA were as follows: 43.4, 31.6 and 25.0%; 57.3, 25.3 and 17.4%; and 12.5, 26.7 and 60.8% for the low, average and high levels, respectively.…”

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“…With agencies experiencing annual turnover rates between 20-60%, employers have a compelling need to address these difficulties [13]. The complexity of employee retention is further exacerbated because 50% of the clinicians with advanced professional degrees are leaving the field within two years [13] yet it takes a minimum of two years for a clinician to develop the skills to become effective and autonomous [14]. To address this workforce issue, researchers and organizations are exploring factors which influence retention.…”