Abstract

This study was conducted based on grounded theory, a qualitative research method, to gain further in-depth understanding of the burnout experienced by surgeons and the process of coping with burnout. For this purpose, individual in-depth interviews were conducted with nine surgical residents working at a university hospital. As a result of analyzing the interview data based on grounded theory, 34 subcategories and 17 categories were derived from a total of 73 concepts. To summarize the results of this study, the causal conditions for burn-out experienced by surgical residents were imbalance between personal life and work, excessive responsibility experienced by a novice doctor, and inexperience in professionalism. The contextual conditions included double hardship of training and working life, long process to become a specialist, environment where it was difficult to receive help from seniors (doctors), and relational conflicts within the hospital. The central phenomenon of burnout was found to be the experience of a professional identity crisis as a doctor, such as facing physical limitations, becoming emotionally exhausted, feeling helpless, and experiencing professional skepticism. In this process, work mastery, experience of accomplishment, experience of receiving direct help, and personal personality characteristics that further increased the difficulty were found to influence the action/interaction strategies as mediating conditions. To cope with this, exhausted surgical residents alternately used immediate responses to resolve immediate difficulties and adaptive responses focused on problem solving. As a result, surgical residents were found to reflect on their role as doctors and reorganize their calling by reflecting on hardships of the long training process and recalling the motivation and professionalism for choosing a career that had been forgotten due to burnout. Finally, we comprehensively discussed the burnout experience of surgical residents and presented the significance and limitations of this study.