Diagnostic accuracy of the Single-item Measure of Burnout (Japanese version) for identifying medical resident burnout.

Background: Burnout is a psychological syndrome consisting of emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and decreased professional efficacy. The Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) is widely used as the standard measure. However, the MBI is lengthy and not free to use, which makes it a less than ideal tool for regularly assessing burnout. The single question burnout measure (SMB) is a novel and simple measure of burnout, which is associated well with emotional exhaustion and has sufficient diagnostic performance for burnout. This study aimed to evaluate the concurrent and convergent validity of the Japanese version of the single-item measure of burnout (SMB-J) compared with the MBI.

Methods: Ninety-four medical residents volunteered to complete the MBI-General Survey (MBI-GS) and the SMB-J. We assessed the concurrent (sensitivity and specificity) and convergent validity of the SMB-J compared with the MBI-GS.

Results: The sensitivity for identifying burnout using the SMB-J was 53.8%, and the specificity was 88.2%. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) was 0.71. MBI-GS scores on the subscales of Emotional Exhaustion ( = 0.509,  < 0.0001) and Cynicism ( = 0.57,  < 0.0001) strongly correlated with the SMB-J scores.

Conclusions: We concluded that for identifying burnout among Japanese medical residents, the psychometric properties of the SMB-J are comparable to those of the original version of the SMB. Although the SMB-J has low sensitivity to detect burnout, it is more convenient to use than the MBI.