Survey of perceived stress and work demands of consultant doctors.

Abstract

Objectives-The objectives of this study were to assess the work demands as potential stressors of health service consultants, and to describe the development of tools for measuring stress experiences of consultants. Thus for consultants, in common with other health care workers, work "may favour psychic well being" but "may also prove psychically deleterious owing to the individual's own traits, to the working environment, to the nature of the job itself."4 This may be partly explained by the classification of consultants' jobs as being of high demand and (generally) high decision latitude." If specific occupational stressors could be identified, corrective strategies might be useful for doctors and patients alike.Our objectives were firstly to identify, and where necessary develop and devise appropriate self reporting tools for measuring the work demands and stress of consultants, and secondly to apply these tools to find a baseline of important stressors and to study their underlying structure. Reference is made to other reports'213 studying the same sample which deals also with underlying personality traits and coping strategies. Methods GENERAL TOOLSA literature review did not uncover tools that were adequate and specific on their own to assess the work demands or perceived stressors of NHS consultants but several potential stressors were listed. To assess the relevance of these stressors and to highlight others a qualitative approach was used, and 36 consultants selected from a range of specialties in south east Scotland were invited to attend focused group discussions. Of these 26 took part. They were divided between six groups, each headed by one of the first three authors.As a result the following questionnaires were devised:(1) A demographic questionnaire. This requested information including age, sex, marital status, speciality, type of hospital, and years employed. It enquired about the NHS contractual and actual sessional workloads, as well as non-NHS sessions.(2) The consultants work demands scale. This was assessed through visual analogue responses to information about the characteristics of the consultants' work demands. As the job title and department alone were not considered adequate descriptions of the nature of the work and hence of the exposures under study, it asked about differential aspects of the actual work. This would enable, through 217 on 8 May 2018 by guest. Protected by copyright.

Workload and stress in consultant medical microbiologists and virologists: a questionnaire survey

“…The mean stress score among about 350 Scottish consultants in 1995 was 42.8. 7 Taking only the 21 questions used in our study, the mean score of the Scottish consultants would have been approximately 44.5, significantly lower than the mean score of 54.5 for microbiologists and virologists in this survey (p < 0.00005). Although direct comparisons are difficult because of small variations in the phrasing and number of questions, in addition to the time interval between the two surveys, the size of the difference suggests that microbiologists are more stressed.…”

“…(1) personal details and details of current appointment (2) departmental workload and resources Questions on stress were based closely on those used in a 1995 survey of NHS consultants in Scotland 7 and adapted for microbiologists. Psychological morbidity was assessed through the 12 item version of the General Health Questionnaire, a widely accepted screen in occupational settings.…”

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“…Agius et al describe an iterative process of removing variables with general loadings (of 0.40 on more than one factor) and weak loadings (failing to load above 0.39 on any factor). This process is applied to the initial unrotated PCA before applying a varimax or oblimin rotation to interpret the structure of the solution [17].…”