523 - Professional Fulfillment and Burnout Are Strongly Associated with Intent to Leave Among Pediatric Physicians

Physician burnout is rampant. Physician retention is increasingly hard at academic medical centers (AMCs). It is unclear how burnout impacts intent to leave an organization.

Objective: We sought to determine how physician burnout and professional fulfillment impact pediatric physicians’ intent to leave an organization.

Design/Methods:

We performed 120 1:1 semi-structured interviews with our pediatric faculty and used the themes from those to develop a Likert-scale based, 22-question battery of their current work experience. We combined those questions with a standardized instrument that assesses burnout and professional fulfillment to create a faculty climate survey. We surveyed pediatric and pediatric-affiliated (e.g. pediatric surgery, pediatric psychiatry, etc) physicians between November 2 and December 9, 2022. We used standard statistical methods to analyze the data. A p-value < 0.05 was considered significant.

Results: A total of 142 respondents completed the survey, 129 (91%) were Pediatrics faculty. Burnout was present in 41% (58/142) of respondents, whereas 30% (42/142) were professionally fulfilled. Figure 1 demonstrates the inverse relationship between professional fulfillment and intent to leave, p< 0.001 for the trend. For each point increase in professional fulfillment, the odds ratio of intending to leave in the next three years was 0.244 [95% CI 0.082-0.723], p=0.011. Figure 2 demonstrates the direct relationship between burnout and intent to leave, p< 0.001 for the trend.  

Conclusion(s):

Among pediatric physicians, professional fulfillment is strongly, inversely related with intent to leave the organization in the next three years. Similarly, burnout is directly related with intent to leave. These data suggest a lack of professional fulfillment and high burnout are strong predictors of pediatric physician turnover in our academic center.