Introduction : Medical professionals are known to experience high levels of stress because of their work since the current pandemic but they are not often recognized as vulnerable and hence little attention is paid to their mental health . We aim to study the factors contributing to the burnout syndrom such as smoking.

Objective :  To study the correlation between smoking and the prevalence of burnout syndrom among tunisian practitioners.

Methods :  A prospective and descriptive study, referring to Maslash Burnout Inventory, among a sample of medical professionals in COVID department in Sfax from January to March 2020 by emailing a survey to 231 eligible participants.

Results :  Public COVID hospitals were the most frequent workplaces. Sixty three percent of people had high level of emotional exhaustion (EE) , 57% had high level of depersonnalisation(DP) and 73% had low personal accomplishement(AP).

These three components of MBI were correlated to female gender (P=0.001),  single status (P=0.001), and the fear of contaminating siblings (P=0.001).Daily direct exposure to positive patient was noted in 79% of cases, and 42% of them had night shifts.  High level of (DP) and low (AP) were correlated with night shifts at hospital (P=0.001). Emotional exhaustion was related to the auto-prescription of anxiety medications (p=0.003).

In our study smoking was not correlated to the burnout syndrom globally but it was significatively related to high level of depersonalization (p=0.044)

Conclusion : This study shows a high self-reported burnout level  among medical professionals. It highlights the need for effective interventions on the factors contributing to it in order to reduce BOS since the pandemic is still going on to this day.