key: cord-0908029-qk9mqs6y authors: Xiao, Yu; Chen, Jia title: Job Burnout Facing Chinese General Practitioners in the Context of COVID-19 date: 2022-03-29 journal: Int J Qual Health Care DOI: 10.1093/intqhc/mzac023 sha: 45a296a96876b0f5634b2ae262d75985bcebc7ba doc_id: 908029 cord_uid: qk9mqs6y nan Dear Editor, As general practitioners (GPs), we read the article "Factors associated with self-reported medical errors among healthcare workers: a cross-sectional study from Oman"(1) with great interest. This study emphasized the importance of implementing specific strategies to alleviate the burnout of health workers. Burnout is related to absenteeism, and closely linked to the intention to quit the general practice. As this study shows (1), burnout will also reduce job performance and increase the risk of medical errors, thus affecting the health of patients. During the COVID-19 epidemic, 76% of Chinese doctors experienced job burnout, which reflected an alerting level compared to prior studies (2) . It has been found that the burnout of GPs was higher than that of other specialists (3) . Given that China accounts for more than one fifth of the world's population, it is necessary to deliver the solution of job burnout of Chinese GPs to global primary care physicians. The intervention of job burnout can be divided into physician-individual level and organizational level. The former usually involves cognitive and behavioral techniques to enhance working ability and improve communication skills, stress management, personal coping strategies and self-care training (4). The latter includes reducing workload, strengthening work control, improving teamwork, changing job evaluation and improving the level of participation in decision-making (4). Raising salary level, increasing health human resources, creating better opportunities for junior doctors, and formulating unified agreements related to the COVID-19 epidemic for medical staff are all expected to help reduce the job burnout of GPs and improve job satisfaction (5). The battle against COVID-19 has exhausted health workers, including GPs. Therefore, it is very important to provide financial, psychological and emotional support to medical staff in this crisis. In addition, policy-makers can hold seminars aimed at raising awareness of job burnout and its prevention methods. These workshops can not only discuss the epidemic control measures face-to-face, but also be conducted through synchronized web-based seminars. A meta-analysis showed that these recent intervention plans for doctors' job burnout are related to some small benefits, which could be improved by adopting organization-oriented 2 methods (4). In other words, burnout is an issue of the whole health care system, not an individual problem. At present, China's medical reform policy also includes promoting disease prevention and strengthening primary health care, which is expected to directly divert and reduce patients in tertiary hospitals, thus reducing the workload of doctors in tertiary hospitals. Finally, given the prominent contradiction between doctors and patients in China, it is very important to promote medical humanities to the general population for eliminating GPs' burnout and maintaining the sustainability of the health system. Importantly, other countries can learn from China's experience to solve and prevent burnout by addressing common influencing factors in various environments and advocating appropriate solutions. Factors associated with self-reported medical errors among healthcare workers: a cross-sectional study from Oman Psychological status of medical workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic: a cross-sectional study Burnout and satisfaction with work-life balance among US physicians relative to the general US population Controlled interventions to reduce burnout in physicians: a systematic review and meta-analysis Prevalence of health care worker burnout during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in Japan YX conceived and wrote the first draft, which was critically revised by JC. All authors approved the final version of the manuscript. YX is responsible for the overall content as guarantor. The authors received no grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors. The authors declare that they have no competing interests.