ORIGINAL ARTICLE Burnout risk in medical students in Spain using the Maslach Burnout Inventory-Student Survey Fernando Gala ´n • Arturo Sanmartı ´n • Juan Polo • Lucas Giner Received: 14 April 2010 / Accepted: 16 February 2011 / Published online: 4 March 2011 Ó Springer-Verlag 2011 Abstract Purpose It is questionable whether the Maslach Burnout is suitable for studying burnout prevalence in preclinical medical students because many questions are patient-cen- tered and the students have little or no contact with patients. Among factors associated with burnout in medical students, the gender shows conflicting results. The first aim of this study was to investigate the prevalence of the risk of burnout in medical students in preclinical and clinical years of training, using the Maslach Burnout Inventory-Student Survey, specifically designed and validated to assess the burnout in university students, and secondly, to investigate the association between gender and burnout subscales. Methods A cross-sectional study was carried out in a sam- ple of 270 Spanish medical students—176 (65%) in the third year and 94 (35%) in the sixth year of training—using the Maslach Burnout Inventory-Student Survey questionnaire. Results Internal consistencies (Cronbach’s alpha) for the three subscales on the whole sample were as follows: for exhaustion 0.78, cynicism 0.78, and efficacy 0.71. More- over, the prevalence of burnout risk was significantly higher in sixth-year students 35 (37.5%) compared with students in third year of training 26 (14.8%) (v 2 test, p \ 0.0001). No significant association was found between gender and burnout subscales. Conclusions The Maslach Burnout Inventory-Student Survey overcame difficulties encountered when students have little or no contact with patients. Our findings show that the risk of burnout prevalence doubled from the third year to sixth year of training and that gender was not sig- nificantly associated with any of the subscales of burnout. Keywords Burnout Á Gender Á Medical students Á Maslach Burnout Inventory-Student Survey (MBI-SS) Introduction To date, there is not a general accepted definition of burnout, but the most common definition was offered by Maslach (1993): ‘‘a psychological syndrome of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomp- lishment that can occur among individuals who work with other people in some capacity’’. The Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) is the most commonly used instrument for measuring burnout. Given the increasing interest in burnout within occupations that are not so clearly people-oriented, a general version of the MBI was developed: the MBI-General Survey (MBI-GS) (Schaufeli et al. 1996). Here, the three components of the burnout construct are conceptualized in slightly broader terms, taking into consideration the job itself rather than personal relationships associated with the job. The MBI- GS has three subscales parallel to those of the MBI: exhaustion, cynicism, and professional effectiveness. Of these subscales, the one that differs from the original MBI is the introduction of cynicism instead of depersonaliza- tion. Depersonalization is the quality of burnout that was F. Gala ´n (&) Department of Medicine, School of Medicine, University of Seville, Avda Doctor Fedriani s/n, 41009 Seville, Spain e-mail: fgalan@us.es A. Sanmartı ´n Á L. Giner Department of Psychiatry, School of Medicine, University of Seville, Seville, Spain J. Polo Department of Preventive Medicine and Public Health, School of Medicine, University of Seville, Seville, Spain 123 Int Arch Occup Environ Health (2011) 84:453–459 DOI 10.1007/s00420-011-0623-x