Purpose: In Korea, health teachers have been playing a major role for students’ and faculty’s health at schools. However, they may experience burnout in the current system with limited resources at schools, which may be resulted from personal char...
Purpose: In Korea, health teachers have been playing a major role for students’ and faculty’s health at schools. However, they may experience burnout in the current system with limited resources at schools, which may be resulted from personal characteristics, work environment, work-related stress, and interpersonal relationships with other teachers. The purpose of the study was to identify levels of the burnout of health teachers and to determine factors associated with their burnout.
Methods: The participants of the study were 540 health teachers at elementary, middle, and high schools who had participated in a 2010 job competence education program. The burnout level was measured by using Maslach burnout inventory. We used four sub-variables of the burnout, i.e., entire exhaustion, emotional exhaustion, lack of individual accomplishment, and depersonalization state. We performed stepwise multiple regression analyses to determine factors associated with the burnout, focusing on personal factors (i.e., self-esteem), work environment factors (i.e., the number of students who visit the health care office, the number of classes at school, and school location), work-related stress factors (i.e., role conflict, role ambiguity, workload, autonomy and promotion), and interpersonal relationship factors (i.e., emotional social support from other teachers or from a supervisor).
Results: The total burnout level of health teachers was 2.74 points. Of the burnout sub-variables, emotional exhaustion, lack of personal accomplishment, and depersonalization were 3.19 points, 2.58 points, and 2.44 points, respectively. Moreover, we found that factors associated with the burnout were self-esteem, the number of classes, role ambiguity, and emotional social support from other teachers.
Conclusions: Compared to burnout levels for other health care professionals that were noted in previous studies, the burnout level of health teachers appeared to be higher in the present study. A lower level of self-esteem, higher workload, a greater size of classes at school, higher level of role ambiguity, and a lower level of emotional social support from other teachers were associated with higher burnout levels of health teachers.
Keywords: burnout, health teacher, schools, work environment, work-related stress, interpersonal relationship