Revue médicale de Bruxelles
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The definition of burn-out the most often cited and proposed by Maslach and Jackson, clarifies the three cardinal symptoms affecting doctors, namely, emotional exhaustion, with depersonalization of their patients and reduction of the feeling of personal accomplishment. The causes of this phenomenon are relatively well-known: individual psychological factors, stressful factors intrinsic to the medical practice and finally extrinsic factors related to the professional environment and its organization. The purpose of this review is to estimate the prevalence of burnout within the population of Belgian family physicians and to understand both individual and societal consequences. ⋯ There are also arguments demonstrating the fact that this disorder amongst general practitioners influences negatively the quality of care, their cost, but also medical demography of primary care with as a corollary a questioning of the viability of the health care system as we know it. At the time of writing this article, the Belgian Health Care Knowledge Centre (KCE) is completing, at the request of the Belgian Ministry (SPF) of Health a study entitled "Burn Out of General Practitioners: which prevention, which solutions" whose goal is to make recommendations for the prevention and support of this issue. To measure the real impact of the solutions eventually implemented, we need to create a tool for a regular assessment of the prevalence of this problem in our country.