SMA specialists face high rates of burnout, leading to delayed care
Study in Spain finds those who procrastinate are less open to innovation
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- SMA specialists face high rates of burnout and procrastination, delaying patient care.
- Burnout is linked to procrastination and reduced openness to innovative SMA treatments.
- Interventions addressing clinician burnout can improve decision-making and care for SMA patients.
Healthcare professionals who specialize in managing spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) are prone to putting off tasks related to patient care, likely because they are stressed and exhausted, a study found.
A research team in Spain found a strong relationship between burnout and procrastination, suggesting that professional exhaustion may drive intentional, unnecessary delays in completing tasks. Clinicians who scored higher on questionnaires aimed at measuring procrastination also showed lower openness to evidence-based innovations in SMA care.
“These exploratory findings suggest that targeted interventions to mitigate clinician burnout may facilitate the optimization of decision-making processes in complex neuromuscular care,” the researchers wrote.
The study, “Behavioral barriers in the management of spinal muscular atrophy: The role of procrastination, regret, and burnout,” was published in PLOS ONE.
Burnout, procrastination common in high-pressure jobs
Managing SMA is complex, despite advances such as the development of disease-modifying therapies. This can be emotionally taxing for patients, families, and healthcare providers. The emotional burden of making treatment decisions may lead to procrastination. Procrastination and burnout, a state of exhaustion related to ongoing stressors, are known concerns in high-pressure professions, including healthcare.
However, there is limited research on the prevalence of these concerns among SMA care professionals. “Identifying these behavioral barriers is vital to optimizing outcomes in a field where early intervention is the primary determinant of survival and motor function preservation,” the researchers wrote.
They asked members of a Spanish registry of SMA healthcare specialists to complete surveys about procrastination and related behaviors, then analyzed the results. Thirty-seven professionals, including neurologists, speech-language therapists, and rehabilitation specialists, completed the study. This represented one-quarter of all of the specialists in the registry.
Among this group, 35.1% showed moderate to high levels of procrastination. Burnout was also common, affecting 27% of participants. Other common factors included high levels of empathy, found in slightly less than half of the survey respondents.
People with higher scores on the procrastination scale were less likely to be open to new ideas or innovations in SMA care, suggesting “that decision-making delay acts as a systemic barrier to evidence-based practice,” the team wrote.
Compared with professionals with no or mild procrastination, those with moderate or high procrastination were significantly more likely to experience burnout. Participants with burnout were more than eight times as likely as those without burnout to show procrastination behaviors.
The researchers also asked participants about regret, which they defined as an emotional response to believing that alternative care decisions would have been more effective for their patients in the past. Participants who procrastinated showed significantly greater regret intensity. However, after controlling for burnout, regret couldn’t accurately predict whether providers would procrastinate.
A model of the relationships among procrastination, burnout, and regret suggested that burnout directly affected procrastination. “It is plausible that the relationship between these factors is bidirectional: while professional exhaustion may facilitate behavioral delay, chronic procrastination may simultaneously exacerbate stress and anxiety, ultimately contributing to the development of burnout,” the researchers wrote.
The findings imply that behavioral factors among healthcare professionals could influence care decisions in SMA. Interventions at both systemic and individual levels could help address procrastination, burnout, and other concerns among SMA providers, the researchers suggested. Hospitals and other organizations could implement programs to reduce the burden on clinicians who deliver SMA care. These could include counseling programs and measures to avoid understaffing.
For individuals, “targeted training in mindfulness and emotion-regulation may help restore self-regulatory capacity and enhance clinicians’ resilience,” the researchers wrote.
These types of strategies could support better decision-making in SMA treatment, they suggested.
The researchers noted that their study had limitations. The relatively small number of respondents may have precluded the detection of subtle associations, they said, although they stressed that it represented the multidisciplinary workforce in the SMA care field.
