OBJECTIVE: burnout during residency education is a phenomenon which requires careful study. A single item for measuring burnout shows promise for its brevity and concordance with the most commonly used measure of burnout, the Maslach burnout Inventory, but has not been compared to the Copenhagen burnout Inventory. We compared the single-item measure of burnout question to the Copenhagen burnout Inventory to assess the convergence between these two measures of burnout.
METHOD: Family Medicine residents (n = 32) from three residency programs completed the single-item measure of burnout question and the Copenhagen burnout Inventory. We compared the single-item measure of burnout measure to the three scales of the Copenhagen burnout Inventory.
RESULTS: Our analyses indicated that the single item measure is highly correlated with personal burnout (r = .76), moderately correlated with patient burnout (r = .58), and not correlated with work burnout (r = .18).
CONCLUSIONS: Because the single-item measure of burnout is particularly useful for identifying personal burnout, it may help to identify early signs of burnout amount physicians in training.
