Medical students experience long training hours with limited down time to rest, recuperate, or recreate. Research supports negative effects on attitudes, exhaustion, and feelings of personal accomplishments. Athletic training graduate programs appear to follow a similar model of long hours. Heavy travel schedules and the depersonalization of athletic environments appear to lead to high levels of stress and exhaustion. Graduate course attendance and performance appear to suffer. Research shows that women athletic trainers leave the profession by age 28 because of work/life imbalance, conflict with parenting and personal time, thus making up only 25% of full-time athletic trainers in the Division I setting. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship of health care attitudes, health care practices, depersonalization, and personal accomplishments relative to emotional exhaustion among randomly sampled graduate student athletic trainers across all NCAA divisions.
Method:
Participants were male (n=73) and female (n=39) graduate student athletic trainers across all Divisions. Participants answered, using SurveyMonkey, the Maslach Burnout Inventory (valid tool for measuring burnout in medical professions) and a general health care attitude (Cronbach .79) and practice (Cronbach .76) survey. Forward multiple regression was conducted to determine which independent variables (health care attitudes, health care practices, depersonalization) were predictors of emotional exhaustion. Correlations were run between gender, emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and personal accomplishments.
Analysis/Results:
Regression results indicate an overall model of two predictors (health care attitudes, depersonalization) that significantly predict emotional exhaustion R2=.501, R2adj=.48, F(4,107)=26.8,p=.0001. The model accounts for 50% of the variability in emotional exhaustion. Personal accomplishment is inversely related to emotional exhaustion (r=-.29,p=.002) and depersonalization (r=-.31,p=.001), accounting for 8% and 9% of the variability respectfully. Gender did not significantly predict in this model.
Conclusions:
Findings support that the depersonalization of the athletic environment and poor health care attitudes negatively impact graduate athletic trainers, leading to emotional exhaustion, low feelings of personal accomplishment, and burnout. This research supports that the current medical model of long, intense hours negatively impacts graduate student athletic trainers regardless of gender. Medical providers need to rethink this model as depersonalization and poor health care attitudes appear to lead to emotional exhaustion and a lack of personal accomplishment which could impact quality of health care and increased burnout from the profession.