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Physician stress and burnout is a serious and common concern in healthcare, with over half of physicians in the USA meeting at least one criterion for burnout. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A review on current state of physician stress and burnout research, from 2008 to 2016, was undertaken. A subsequent perspective paper was shaped around these reviews.

Findings reveal research strength in prevalence and incidence with opportunities for stronger intervention studies. While descriptive studies on causes and consequences of physician burnout are available, studies on interventions and prevention of physician burnout are lacking. Future research on physician stress and burnout should incorporate intervention studies and take care to avoid limitations found in current research. Accountability and prevention of physician burnout is the responsibility of the healthcare industry as a whole, and organizational strategies must be emphasized in future research.

The value of this research comes in the original comprehensive review, international inclusion and succinct summary of physician burnout research and strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate gender differences in work experiences, satisfactions and psychological health among physicians in Turkey.

Data were collected from 237 male and 194 female physicians using an anonymously completed questionnaire. Measures included personal demographic and work situation characteristics, stable individual difference factors (e.g. workaholism components, Type A behavior, optimism), job behaviors (e.g. perfectionism, hours worked), work and extra‐work satisfactions, indicators of work engagement, and psychological wellbeing.

There were few differences in personal demographic and work situation characteristics. Female physicians had less professional tenure and worked fewer hours and extra‐hours per week. Female and male physicians were similar on stable individual difference factors, job behaviors, work outcomes, extra‐work satisfactions and psychological wellbeing, with a few exceptions. Female physicians reported more work‐family conflict and more psychosomatic symptoms and tended to be absent more.

Data were collected using self‐report questionnaires raising the possibility of response set tendencies. It is also not clear to what extent these findings generalize to male and female physicians in other countries.

Despite previous studies showing considerable gender differences in the work experiences and wellbeing of female and male physicians in other countries, female and male physicians in Turkey reported generally similar job behaviors, satisfactions, quality of life and emotional wellbeing. This suggests that an emphasis on gender similarities rather than gender differences might be warranted.

Purpose – The purpose of this research is to show that the Swedish health care system has undergone major changes during the last decades, which have exerted strong influence on the operational freedom of physicians. Design/methodology/approach – This study consisted of 169 physicians in management positions, who answered a questionnaire assessing the relationship between their organizational settings and their perceived wellbeing. The organizational setting was defined as contact with top management, decision‐making influence, well defined organization and whether the physician is acting as a leader. The perceived wellbeing was defined as social climate, work related exhaustion, work satisfaction, influence, development ability and supportive leadership. Findings – According to the results, organizational support improves work satisfaction and mental energy, and decreases work related exhaustion among physicians. This all leads to decreasing turnover rate among physicians. Originality/value – These results point to the importance of maintaining a positive and supportive atmosphere for physicians in their work environment in order to encourage physicians to remain and take on management positions in the health care system. Furthermore enhancing physician influence over decision making processes is important to counteract work‐related exhaustion and it might also contribute to a more efficient organization.

To date, relatively little evidence has been published as to what represents an effective and efficient way to improve quality of care and safety in hospitals. In addition, the initiatives that do exist are rarely designed or developed with regard to the individual and organisational factors that determine the success or failure of such initiatives. One of the challenges in linking organisational culture to quality of care is to identify the focal point at which a deficient hospital culture and inadequate organisational resources are most evident. The accumulated evidence suggests that such a point is physician burnout. This paper sets out to examine this issue.

The paper reviews the existing literature on organisational culture, burnout and quality of care in the healthcare sector. A new conceptual approach as to how organisational culture and quality of care can be more effectively linked through the physician experience of burnout is proposed.

Recommendations are provided with regard to how future research can approach quality of care from a bottom‐up organisational change perspective. In addition, the need to widen the debate beyond US and North European experiences is discussed.

The present paper represents an attempt to link organisational culture, job burnout and quality of care in a more meaningful way. A conceptual model has been provided as a way to frame and evaluate future research.

Recognition of the importance and difficulty of engaging physicians in organisational change has sparked an explosion of literature. The social identity approach, by considering engagement in terms of underlying group identifications and intergroup dynamics, may provide a framework for choosing among the plethora of proposed engagement techniques. This paper seeks to address this issue.

The authors examined how four disparate organisations engaged physicians in change. Qualitative methods included interviews (109 managers and physicians), observation, and document review.

Beyond a universal focus on relationship-building, sites differed radically in their preferred strategies. Each emphasised or downplayed professional and/or organisational identity as befit the existing level of inter-group closeness between physicians and managers: an independent practice association sought to enhance members' identity as independent physicians; a hospital, engaging community physicians suspicious of integration, stressed collaboration among separate, equal partners; a developing integrated-delivery system promoted alignment among diverse groups by balancing “systemness” with subgroup uniqueness; a medical group established a strong common identity among employed physicians, but practised pragmatic co-operation with its affiliates.

The authors cannot confirm the accuracy of managers' perceptions of the inter-group context or the efficacy of particular strategies. Nonetheless, the findings suggested the fruitfulness of social identity thinking in approaching physician engagement.

Attention to inter-group dynamics may help organisations engage physicians more effectively.

This study illuminates and explains variation in the way different organisations engage physicians, and offers a theoretical basis for selecting engagement strategies.

This paper aims to examine complex clinical decision‐making processes in trauma center units of hospitals in terms of the immediate impact of complexity on the medical team involved in the trauma event.

It is proposed to develop a model of decision‐making processes in trauma events that uses a Bayesian classifier model with convolution and deconvolution operators to study real‐time observed trauma data for the decision‐making process under tremendous stress. The objective is to explore and explain physicians' decision‐making processes under stress and time constraints during actual trauma events from the perspective of complexity.

Because physicians have blurred information and cues that are tainted by random environmental noise during injury‐related events, they must de‐blur (de‐convolute) the collected data to find a best approximation of the real data for decision‐making processes.

The data collection and analysis is innovative and the permission to access raw audio and video data from an active trauma center will differentiate this study from similar studies that rely on simulations, self report and case study approaches.

Clinical decision makers in trauma centers are placed in situations that are increasingly complex, making decision‐making and problem‐solving processes multifaceted.

The science of complex adaptive systems, together with human judgment theories, provide important concepts and tools for responding to the challenges of healthcare this century and beyond.

This study aims to investigate workplace stress and its related patterns (sources, patient interactions, and coping strategies) among health care employees in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Academic research in this area is limited, and the globalization of health care services requires an examination of areas that have the potential to affect employee performance - which ultimately impacts health care service and quality. Based on a sample of 175 employees from both public and private health care organizations, results indicate the primary source of workplace stress is role ambiguity, while the lowest cause of stress is patients. The primary coping strategy used by our sample participants is productiveness and activity. Our findings are useful to healthcare management in order to address employee stress-related concerns, and increase the quality of health care provided.

Based on the job-demands resources model, this study examines the potential of human resource management practices to simultaneously improve physicians' burnout and quality of patient care during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Drawing on a sample of 499 physicians working in specialised medical units, structural equation models through PLS-SEM was used to check the proposed hypotheses.

The results show that human resource management can reduce physicians' burnout and increase quality of patient care by considering job demands and job resources as mediators. In addition, this study suggests that burnout and quality of patient care can be improved simultaneously.

This research is focused on healthcare, which opens important opportunities to extend the proposed model in other public and private industries.

Managers need to understand that fostering well-being among employees is crucial for human resource management and impacts positively on employee performance.

This study offers a double mediation process whereby job demands and job resources are key underlying mechanisms through which human resource management practices reduce burnout and improve performance in a compatible way.

Female physicians have less influence over their daily work conditions and exhibit slower career advancement as compared to their male colleagues. The aim of this study is to assess the impact on individual and organizational well being from different kinds of management programs. Female physicians participating in management intervention programs were compared with a reference group of matched physicians and sickness absenteeism was significantly lower in the intervention group. No significant differences were found between the groups with regard to career advancement, individual, organizational and professional well being. Health care organizations spend a substantial amount of resources on management programs in order to improve leadership, autonomy and the work‐environment of physicians in times of increasing discontent among this key group of health care employees. Our study indicates some beneficial health effects from structured management programs but there is a need to develop and assess the efficacy of these programs further.

This paper examines medical managers' beliefs about the impact reduced‐hour career paths for physicians has on organizational effectiveness. The findings of this exploratory inductive study of 17 medical managers at nine medical organizations in the Boston area suggest that managers believe the benefits of reduced‐hour physicians (RHPs) far outweigh the disadvantages. However, many of their reasons appear to be exploitative of RHPs. In particular, managers believe that employing RHPs results in increased managerial control and that RHPs should: work more than they are compensated for; do a disproportionate share of the undesirable work; and remain extra flexible and available to the organization. An interpretation of the findings based on psychological contract theory is offered, and may help to illuminate other results reported in the literature, including some controversial findings that reduced‐hour workers tend to have poor health outcomes.