Clinician burnout (CBO) research trends from 2013-2022: Results from the State of Cancer Care in America (SOCCA) ASCO Annual Meeting abstract analysis.

41 Background: Interest in CBO and wellness has increased due to concern about the impact of workforce wellness on the quality of care. Oncology CBO accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic and affected the entire health care system and workforce. We analyzed whether increased interest in CBO is reflected in research on the oncology workforce by reviewing abstracts submitted to the ASCO Annual Meeting between 2013-2022. Methods: We reviewed abstracts from the 2013-2022 ASCO Annual Meetings available from the ASCO Data Library. We limited our analysis to abstracts accepted to the Care Delivery and Regulatory Policy, Health Services Research, and the Professional Development & Education Advances tracks. Abstract titles and body text were searched for keywords related to CBO, and a manual review was conducted to ensure match validity. A Poisson regression was used to estimate the annual rate of change. Results: Of the 48,761 abstracts submitted to the ASCO Annual Meeting between 2013-2022, 4,843 abstracts were submitted to the tracks of interest. The keyword search and subsequent manual review identified 53 abstracts related to CBO (1.1% of relevant track submissions, and 0.1% of all abstract submissions). 4 (8%) abstracts flagged for CBO terms were submitted in the first 5 years of the time-period (2013-2017), while 49 (92%) abstracts were submitted in the last 5 years of the time-period (2018-2022). From 2013-2022 there was a 34.1% annual increase (95% confidence interval: 18.1%, 54.1%) in CBO related abstracts submitted to the tracks of interest. Of those submitted between 2021-2022, 30% (n=8) were related to the impact of COVID-19 on CBO. Between 2013-2022, 53% of all abstracts and 72% of health service track abstracts submitted to the ASCO Annual Meeting were submitted by US-based authors. Of the 53 CBO abstracts identified between 2013-2022, 72% (n=38) were written by US-based authors. Conclusions: CBO-related research submitted to the ASCO Annual Meeting increased between 2013-2022 with a predominant share originating from US-based researchers. This reflects the growing concern in the U.S. health care system around workforce wellness and the potential negative impact of CBO on the quality of patient care. Importantly, the factors contributing to CBO existed prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, including institutional and system-level burdens. The COVID-19 pandemic likely accelerated this existing trend as demonstrated by the increase in abstract submissions on CBO in recent years. [Table: see text]