Professional burnout as a legal category

Abstract

The state of fatigue caused by work (“professional burnout”) must be given legal significance. The authors of the article are among the first in legal science to assess the links of “professional burnout” with the categories of work capacity, disability, legal capacity, delictworthiness, social and professional risks. The study solved the tasks of assessing the extent of the real spread of “professional burnout”, its symptoms and their legally significant manifestations in the activities of pedagogical and medical workers classified as high-risk groups of exposure to “professional burnout”, in order to formulate ideas on this basis about the place and role of assessment of “professional burnout” in the system of relations regulated by labour and administrative law, social security law. The data used as the basis of the study were collected in the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic, during a period of drastic changes in organizational and socio-psychological working conditions, exacerbation of stressful factors. To assess them, the methods of questionnaires, legal analysis, comparative analysis with the progress and results of medical research, generalization of statistical data were used. As a result, a unique database was formed on the dynamics of the health of teaching staff, a detailed description of the professional burnout of medical workers, symptoms that pose a threat of negative sociolegal consequences were identified by the phases of the syndrome development, a comparative characteristic of the socially significant symptoms of “professional burnout” was created and based on it — the characteristic of legally significant features of the syndrome as a whole, as a fact-a condition characterized by increasing dynamics, shows the connection between the structure of violations detected as a result of control and supervisory measures committed by medical workers in the provision of medical care with the development of “professional burnout” in this environment, the means and legal mechanisms for preventing or minimizing the risk of the formation of “professional burnout” are presented, the necessity and possibility of conceptual changes in the system of assessing working conditions by groups of factors of production by including a new group in them — socio-psychological factors with the attribution to them of work regimes, the quality of labour rationing, the quality of communication, for which the identified indicators of “professional burnout” will be one of the indicators of well-being or trouble in the production environment.