Career Satisfaction and Continued Educational Experiences

摘要

Despite increasing popularity as a specialtychoice, emergency medicine (EM) continues to have problemswith physician burnout. A recent Medscape survey placed EMas the specialty with highest number of physicians reportingburnout (51%). Many factors have been associated withburnout/career satisfaction, but there is little data on howcontinued educational experiences affect these outcomes.Objectives: To assess career satisfaction and factorsaffecting career satisfaction in a group of community emergencyphysicians attending an international educational conference.Methods: A mobile app survey using CrowdCompasswas administered in October 2015, during a large internationalconference (Essentials of Emergency Medicine) asking thefollowing two questions: On a scale of 1-5, how satisfied areyou with Emergency Medicine as your medical specialty?”and the free response question: “What have you done and/or what can be done to improve your career satisfaction?”.Concept codes were developed with an inductive approachand each response was coded based on the concepts present. Ifa response contained multiple concepts, it was coded once foreach concept it contained.Results: Of 1753 conference attendees, 391 responseswere collected for the question asking respondents to rate his/her career satisfaction. There were 348 respondents (89%)who rated her career satisfaction as a 4 or 5 on the Likertscale (satisfied or very satisfied respectively). For the freeresponse question, 219 responses were obtained. The topthree most coded concepts were shifts/scheduling (45, 21%),work-life balance (38, 17%) and continued medical education/conference attendance (21, 10%).Conclusions: Community emergency physicians whoattended a large international educational conference havehigh rates of career satisfaction. This is higher than the65.2% reported to have “high satisfaction in a previousstudy. Top contributors to career satisfaction are scheduling/shift burden, work-life balance, and continuing medicaleducation. Although previous studies have shown lack ofopportunity to attend conferences to be associated withburnout, our qualitative data shows that participating ineducational conferences is a top contributor to increasedcareer satisfaction.