Extensive scientific literature highlights that healthcare professionals’ work is relentlessly overloaded and emotionally overwhelming, influencing their personal lives, and thus, favouring burnout development. According to the World Health Organization, burnout is the final outcome of continuous workplace stress that has not been managed efficiently. In the context of the global extension of burnout in health care and of its introduction in the 11th revised edition of the International Classification of Diseases, it has become a matter of urgency to address this issue in a timely and effective manner. For medical and health allied fields, the proper time for prevention is throughout university years, for two main reasons. Firstly, burnout may occur quite early during the university studies and can develop up to a cumulative prevalence ranging from 44.2% (Frajerman et al., 2019) to 75% (Erschens et al., 2019). Secondly, when starting a new career, the development of personal skills to prevent burnout in physicians, nurses, physiotherapists, psychologists, and other health allied professionals may be decisive for proper management of professional stress, which in turn, can be reflected in a better quality of care. THE AIM OF BENDiT-EU PROJECT: The aim of our project is to prepare a comprehensive set of resources that will address the issue of burnout in health and health allied universities at three distinct levels: organizational (IO4), collective (IO3) and individual (IO2), including all stakeholders (IO1). THE TARGET GROUPS: In the BENDiT-EU project, based on our triple approach mentioned above, we target: a) the INDIVIDUAL level: medical and allied health students in 5 partner countries (Romania, Spain, Portugal, Cyprus, and Bulgaria); b) the COLLECTIVE level: support staff who work in the 5 BENDiT-EU medical universities; this includes teaching staff who might have an intensive supervising role (mentors, tutors, advisers, etc.), staff working in psychological counselling for students, and staff working in other services aimed at providing different forms of support to students; and c) the ORGANISATIONAL level: representatives of governing bodies, responsible with policymaking at the university level. THE OBJECTIVES, ACTIVITIES, AND RESULTS: 1) RAISE AWARENESS ABOUT BURNOUT (IO1): we will start with a comprehensive search of literature for evidence of effective interventions regarding academic burnout prevention and synthesize the information in a very accessible format, specifically a Burnout Manual - pocket edition. We selected this format (similar to medical pocket guides, to which health professionals are used) considering that accessibility is important for conveying our key messages on a wide scale, and also on the premise that (a) burnout prevention can become a daily habit and (b) self-treatment is easily available. 2) DEVELOP ONLINE TOOLS (IO2): based on IO1, we will develop a web-based application that will offer students the possibility to self-assess burnout and, based on their results, to receive counselling and suggestions for further reading, training or other forms of skills development in preventing or addressing burnout. 3) CREATE A BURNOUT CURRICULUM (IO3): as a complement to the online web-application, a five day, face to face, experiential research-based program for students and a short training program for support staff will be implemented in partner universities. 4) DRIVE POLICY CHANGES (IO4): a policy toolkit to support decision-makers in universities will also be developed by using consensus-making methods (such as a Delphi approach). The toolkit will summarize best practices on an international level and will provide a set of measures that medical and health allied universities could implement, in order to decrease student burnout. We expect that around 5000 students and staff from medical partner universities will be involved in our project through one or more of the IOs. THE LONG-TERM BENEFIT: The highly comprehensive approach we are employing for BENDiT-EU project has the potential cumulative advantage of a multi-layered intervention. By addressing all levels where burnout can be efficiently managed (i.e. individual, collective, and organizational), we increase the chances of a potential large scale effect, occurring throughout the project in partner universities. This effect could be reached also at the European level, when making available to other countries or academic structures the BENDiT-EU package, i.e. the Burnout manual - pocket edition, the web-based application for students, the experiential training curriculum for students and the train-the-trainer guide for support staff, as well as a policy toolkit for the decision-makers. As burnout may generate huge societal costs and impact the quality of life of many people, we hope that our project could contribute to fighting this phenomenon in a timely and efficient manner.
The objectives of the project were the following: 1. Raising awareness about burnout and providing on a wide scale up-to-date, evidence- based information for the identification, the prevention and the interventions for academic burnout; 2. Improving the wellbeing of medical and allied-health professionals, who are at risk of developing burnout and developing on-line tools to self-assess burnout; 3. Improving the skills of medical and allied-health students and staff working in universities, who directly address or refer to cases of academic burnout; 4. Drive policy changes: providing recommendations for developing normatives and regulations designed to address and prevent academic burnout in universities.
In the context of the global extension of burnout in healthcare, this condition was introduced in the 11th revised edition of the International Classification of Diseases. Despite this kind of legitimization, it is clear that concrete actions are needed, in order to address this phenomenon in a timely, extensive and effective manner. In this sense, the BENDiT-EU strategic partnership considers that burnout prevention, in order to be efficient, needs to start as early as possible, during university studies. The process involves the extensive acquisition of skills and the use of tools designed to recognize burnout symptoms and monitor their evolution. Burnout has to be addressed at multiple levels. At the organizational level, universities need policies that could help in promoting wellbeing and quality of life. On the collective level, professors, tutors and counselling staff in universities should be responsible for monitoring the wellbeing of medical and allied-health students, by offering practical solutions to work overload. At the individual level, students need to be able to recognize the symptoms of burnout and take advantage of the available support materials and instruments provided by their universities.