Impact of demographic and occupational characteristics on burnout and satisfaction of healthcare professionals during COVID-19

OBJECTIVE To determine the level of burnout and job satisfaction, their degree of correlation, as well as the effect of demographic and occupational characteristics of healthcare professionals between three different public hos-pitals during the COVID-19 pandemic. METHOD The questionnaire is divided into three parts; the first is related to the collection of demographic data, the second includes the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory (CBI) and the third the Job Satisfaction Survey (JSS). The survey was conducted using an anonymous questionnaire with closed -end-ed questions. The research sample consisted of 195/300 (response rate: 65%) healthcare professionals from all cat-egories such as doctors, nurses, radiologists, laboratory technologists and physiotherapists. The research was held from March to April 2021 in three public hospitals of Greece ("Sismanogleio" General Hospital of Komotini, Univer-sity Hospital of Alexandroupolis, General Hospital of Athens "Korgialenio-Benakio" [GNA NEES]). The analysis of col-lected data was performed through the Statistical Package for Social Scienes (SPSS), version 21.0.RESULTS In terms of job satisfaction, the results of the present study showed that the positive factors of increased job satisfaction were nature of work, supervision and relationships with colleagues, while negative factors that lead to reduced job satis-faction, were salary, operational conditions of the working environment and lack of additional earnings, promotions and the rewards. Men and those who worked as assistants showed greater overall job satisfaction. Reduced over-all satisfaction was experienced by doctors, employees in a closed department, as well as employees at GNA NEES. In terms of burnout in all three dimensions, there was an average total burnout of 46.3% with the highest average burnout corresponding to personal burnout of 47.7% and the lowest value for burnout related to patients (44.3%). Intense exhaustion was more common in women, nurses and those working in closed wards.CONCLUSIONS The outbreak of the pandemic and the major changes that took place in the hospital units affected health profession-als and especially the professional sector of nurses, resulting in intense personal and work exhaustion, while signifi-cantly reducing their job satisfaction.