Study design and sampling
Based on informed consent and voluntary participation, a cross-sectional study was conducted from July to August 2019 to investigate the status of presenteeism and job burnout among medical practitioners in China's second- and third-class medical institutions. In China, medical institutions are divided into three levels: The first class is small primary medical institutions; the second class is medium-sized medical institutions; the third is large tertiary medical institutions. The functions of these different levels of medical institutions are different. The second- and the third-class medical institutions, which are mostly municipal, provincial or national general hospitals, provide specialized health protection and nursing services for many regions and play important roles in medical education and scientific research. Some studies have found that the incidence of presenteeism in primary medical institutions is slightly lower[38, 39] than in the second- and the third-class medical institutions. Therefore, for greater representativeness, doctors working in second- and third-class institutions were selected as the research object.
To make the sample coverage more extensive and reflect the overall working status of Chinese doctors, a multistage sampling method was adopted in this study. The steps are as follows.
(1) All 31 provinces (autonomous regions and municipalities directly under the Central Government) in mainland China were included in the sampling. In each province, all cities/urban areas under provincial jurisdiction were divided into 3 urban groups (high, medium and low) according to their GDP per capita in 2018, for a total of 93 urban groups in 31 provinces.
(2) Among hospitals permission was granted to conduct the investigation, hospitals were selected by convenience sampling. At least 2 second-class hospitals and 2 third-class hospitals were selected from each city group.
(3) In each hospital in which at least two doctors were willing to participate in and complete the investigation, we used convenience sampling to select the interviewees. The criteria for the selection of doctors were outpatient or inpatient doctors who had obtained medical qualification certificates, held positions in clinical departments or had prescription rights. Doctors excluded from the selection were nonclinical doctors, such as laboratory technicians, nonprescription doctors (such as doctor assistants) and doctors who were not registered in the sample hospital.
Questionnaire design
The questionnaire was categorized into three parts. The first part was a series of questions about demographic and work-related information suggested to be associated with presenteeism[40]. Among these demographic factors, age, sex, marital status, number of children and educational level were measured[40]. Working factors mainly included hospital department, working years, professional title and position[7, 41, 40].
The second part followed Aronsson's suggestion and used a single question to evaluate doctors’ presenteeism[19]. The dependent variable of presenteeism was measured by asking the doctor "the number of times in the past year (12 months) that he or she had to take time off for physical reasons but still had to work". The answers were "never", "once", "2-5 times" or "more than 5 times". The measurement method has high internal consistency when used in Chinese population, and the retest reliability is 0.31[42]. The response scale was dichotomized for the purpose of logistic regression(0=never/once, 1=2-5 times/ more than 5 times)[19, 13, 40, 43].
The third part was a general scale of job burnout, which was adopted to capture the level of doctors' job burnout. The Chinese version of the 15-item Maslach Burnout Service Inventory (MBI-GS) was adopted, the usage permission of which has been obtained through official channels. In 2002, Chaoping Li carried out exploratory factor analysis on 16 items of MBI-GS, using principal component method to extract factors and orthogonal rotation axis, and found that one item of "cynicism" had high cross load. After deleting this item, the factor analysis was carried out again. The adjusted MBI-GS structure is completely consistent with the original, which shows that MBI-GS has good conceptual validity in China. The internal consistency coefficients of emotional exhaustion, cynicism and reduced personal accomplishment are 0.88, 0.83 and 0.82 respectively.[44]. The questionnaire uses 7-point Likert scale, with 0 representing “never” and 6 representing “very frequent”, including 5 questions on emotional exhaustion, 4 questions on cynicism and 6 questions on personal accomplishment. A total score of emotional exhaustion greater than 14 indicates high degree of emotional exhaustion, while a total score of emotional exhaustion less than 11 indicates low degree[45]. A total score of cynicism higher than 7 indicates the existence of obvious emotional alienation, while a total score of cynicism lower than 5 indicates low degree of cynicism[45]. A score of over 29 in personal accomplishment indicates low sense of achievement, while a score of less than 26 indicates high sense of achievement[45]. The total score of job burnout = 0.4×emotional exhaustion average+0.3×cynicism average+0.3× personal accomplishment average. Total scores that fall into the ranges of 0~1.49, 1.50~3.49 and 3.50~6 indicate the conditions of no burnout, moderate burnout and severe burnout, respectively[46].
Data collection
This study selected undergraduates who had received research and training and had professional medical backgrounds as investigators. Each department had at least 5 doctors who agreed to participate in the survey. The doctors in the sample hospital were interviewed randomly, and relevant information was collected. The content of training for the researchers included the background, purpose, etiquette, methods and skills of the research, methods of dealing with emergencies and the use of research software purchased and redeveloped by the research team.
The content of this study was examined by the Ethics Review Committee of China Pharmaceutical University. Before the formal investigation, the researcher identified the nonworking hours of the hospital and entered the hospital with the oral permission of the hospital director/deputy director. The researcher orally introduced the background, content and purpose of the investigation to the doctor and started the questionnaire for those who were willing to participate in the investigation and sign the informed consent. During the investigation, the researcher opened the questionnaire with the research software in a mobile electronic device, explained the requirements for answering questions in detail, read the questionnaire items and the answers to the multiple-choice questions aloud, and recorded the oral responses of the respondents with the software. The results of the pre-survey show that this interview method is feasible and the reliability and validity of the survey are high. Moreover, the questionnaire is relatively short, and the interviewees will not be tired and agitated, so that the interviewees can answer seriously and better avoid too casual data. All the research was conducted in an undisturbed environment, and the researcher did not show their opinions or any inclinations regarding the research content before or during the research[47].
Data analysis
Presenteeism was the dependent variable, and job burnout was the independent variable. The control variables included demographic and working factors, and descriptive statistics were performed on all data collected from the doctors surveyed, as detailed in Table 1. This study employed a binary logit model to explore the relationship between presenteeism and job burnout. Logistic regression analysis was performed using STATA13.0-SE software, with P<0.05 as the level of significance.