The Prevalence of Burnout and Musculoskeletal Disorders in Physician Associates Students
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Physician Associate, formerly known as Physician Assistant, (PA) is a growing occupation that originated in the 1960s. Previous research focused on the prevalence of musculoskeletal disorders and burnout in nursing, nursing students, PA, and ubiquitously assumed among many healthcare professionals; however, burnout and musculoskeletal disorders are under-researched in PA students. PURPOSE: To investigate the prevalence of burnout and musculoskeletal disorders in Physician Associate students. METHODS: This study was conducted at a private university in Florida. Twelve PA students participated in the study, nine females and three males (mean age 26.3 ± 1.8 years; mean height 166.6 ± 7.6 cm; mean weight 67.9 ± 14.0 kg). Eleven PA students were in their fifth clinical rotation and one in their sixth. Maslach Burnout Inventory Human Services Survey for Medical Personnel (MBI) and the Canadian Medical History Checklist: Symptoms Survey for Work-Related Musculoskeletal Disorders (WMSDs) were used. In the MBI questionnaire, burnout was quantified by three subcomponents: emotional exhaustion (EE), depersonalization (DP), and personal accomplishment (PA). The WMSDs questionnaire measured the degree of acute pain in the neck, shoulder, elbow, wrist, hand, upper back, lower back, and foot. Participants filled out the two questionnaires in one session and the data were collected and analyzed. RESULTS: In the MBI survey, 84% of participants reported high to moderate EE (67% high, 17% moderate, and 17% low); 58.3% of participants reported high to moderate DP (33.3% high, 25% moderate, and 41.7% low); 66.6% of participants reported high to moderate PA (33.3% high, 33.3% moderate, and 33.3% low). In the WMSDs questionnaire, 75% of participants reported having pain or discomfort, in the last year, caused by their job that lasted two days or more in the neck, shoulder, and upper back, whereas 58% reported lower back pain or discomfort. Out of all participants reporting pain or discomfort, several participants reported that pain worsened while working, 67.7% reported for the neck; 44.4% for the shoulder; 67.7% for the upper back; and 57.1% for lower back pain. CONCLUSION: The results of the questionnaires indicated a high prevalence of burnout and musculoskeletal disorders in PA students. Physician Associate programs should include educational content emphasizing techniques to minimize burnout and reduce the prevalence of musculoskeletal disorders. Further research is needed to identify the influence of physical activity and relaxation techniques on burnout levels and the prevalence of musculoskeletal disorders in PA students.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".