Publication:

A cross-sectional epidemiological study of prevalence of work stress among resident doctors of a metropolitan tertiary care hospital

Background To assess the prevalence of work stress , to compare of the prevalance of stress among resident doctors working in clinical and non/para-clinical departments, to determine the factors leading  to stress among resident doctors.

Methods after getting approval from Institutional ethics committee all the resident doctors of the hospital were contacted during a period of data collection of one year. Data was collected using standard questionnaire. Detailed descriptive statistical analysis was done.

Results The mean age of the participants in the study was 26.8 years with maximum age being 39 years and minimum being 24 yrs. Among 454 study subjects nearly 34.8% were female and 64.2% were male i.e. 158 & 296 respectively. Among 454 resident doctors 188 from 1st , 139 from 2nd & 127 were from 3rd year of residency with percentage contribution of 41.4, 30.6 & 28.0 respectively, 39.4% of resident doctors are suffering from some degree of stress. While 16.1% suffered from mild degree of stress 7.9% suffered from moderate degree of stress, the percent of resident doctors suffering from severe and extremely severe degree of stress was 15.2 & 0.2 respectively. The prevalence of stress among clinical is much more (29.2%) as compared to non/para-clinical (13.9%), stress was more with increasing duration of working hours.

Conclusions It was found that the prevalence of stress among resident doctors was much more as compared to general population. The prevalence was directly correlated to factors like duration of working hours, gender and department.