Medical e-learning during the COVID-19 pandemic and students’ burnout: a narrative review

Abstract

The goal of this narrative review was to summarize the literature findings regarding the occurrence and predictors of burnout syndrome in medical students in the online learning period during the COVID-19 pandemic. This review of identified relevant studies showed that their results were highly heterogeneous, primarily due to the important differences between described studies. Our study found that the burnout syndrome prevalence in medical students in the online learning period during the COVID-19 pandemic ranged, depending on the applied questionnaires, from 16.7 to 59.9%. The most commonly identified risk factors associated with burnout syndrome during online education were stress, low resilience, lack of social support, lower life satisfaction, and higher years of studies that involve clinical training. Further research is necessary to precisely determine the burden of burnout syndrome and its predictors in order to plan and create effective interventions aimed at improving psychological well-being of the future healthcare workforce.

KEYWORDS:

• Burnout syndrome
• medical students
• distance learning
• e-learning
• medical education

Acknowledgments

This study was part of project No. 175042 funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological development, Republic of Serbia, 2011–2022.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Authors’ contributions

All authors attest that they meet the current ICMJE criteria for authorship. All authors equally contributed to this manuscript with its conception and design, methodology, software, data curation, formal analysis, literature search, manuscript preparation, writing, visualization, critical revision, and editing. Also, all authors read, reviewed, and approved the final manuscript.

Ethics statement

This study is approved by the Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Medical Sciences, University of Kragujevac (No. 01-14321). This study used completely anonymized data, so consent was not required. All analyses were performed in accordance with the relevant guidelines and regulations.