Work addiction and quality of care in healthcare: Working long hours should not be confused with addiction to work

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Behavioural addictions are addictions that do not involve the ingestion of psychoactive substances and yet feature all the core features found in more traditional substance-based addictions (e.g., withdrawal symptoms, mood modification, tolerance, salience, conflict, and relapse) (1).Although a couple of behavioural addictions have now been formally recognized in major psychiatric and medical diagnostic manuals such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders and the International Classification of Diseases (i.e., addictions to gambling and gaming), all other types of behavioural addiction have not been formally recognised (e.g., addictions to sex, social media, exercise, work, etc.).Work addiction is a controversial topic even though the concept of 'work addiction' in the form of 'workaholism' dates back to the late 1960s (2).Work addiction (like exercise addiction) has been viewed by some as a 'socially respectable addiction' (3) or a 'mixed blessings addiction' (4) particularly because addiction to work can bring some positive benefits.Moreover, there are some professions (e.g., doctors, lawyers, police inspectors) where anecdotal evidence suggests that the prevalence of work addiction is higher than that of the general working public.However, these are professions that sometimes demand very long hours.In these instances,