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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Public Mental Health
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1561588
This article is part of the Research Topic World Mental Health Day: Mental Health in the Workplace View all 11 articles
Gender differences of the association between work-related stressors and mental health among Chinese medical professionals: A nationwide cross-sectional study
Provisionally accepted- Department of General Practice, Sir Run Run Shaw Hospital, School of Medicine, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou Zhejiang, China
Background Chinese medical professionals are under tremendous work pressure, which greatly undermines their mental health, hinders professional performance and impairs the quality of healthcare. However, the specific work-related stressor that affects mental health most and whether gender difference plays a role are not yet known. This study aims to investigate the association between work-related stressors and mental health among medical professionals in China. Methods A cross-sectional online survey was conducted from September 29, 2022 to January 18, 2023 by recruiting 2976 medical professionals from three representative provinces in China through purposive sampling. Anxiety and depressive symptoms were measured by the 7-item Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD-7) scale and Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) scale. Logistic regression models were performed to identify work-related stressor significantly associated with mental health and stratified by gender.The prevalence of major depressive and anxiety symptoms among Chinese medical professionals was 28.2% (839/2976) and 24.0% (714/2976), respectively. Among the subjects, 43.7% (1302/2976) of subjects reported having ≥3 work-related stressors, which was positively related to both major depressive and anxiety symptoms. The following work-related stressors were positively associated with major depressive symptoms: medical dispute and promotion pressure among all participants; violence against medical staff and promotion pressure among males; medical dispute among females. The following work-related stressors were positively associated with major anxiety symptoms: medical dispute and promotion pressure among all participants as well as males. While no work-related stressor showed significant association with major anxiety symptoms among females. Conclusions These findings identified the specific work-related stressors related with the mental health, and gender differences are indicated in this relationship. Interventions directing at improving doctor-patient relationship and reforming promotion system may help to improve mental health of Chinese medical professionals. Reforming promotion system may mitigate the anxiety symptoms of male medical professionals.
Keywords: work-related stressor, Mental Health, Medical professionals, Gender difference, Medical dispute, Promotion pressure
Received: 16 Jan 2025; Accepted: 25 Mar 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Chen, Wu, Xia, Cai and Chen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Liying Chen, Department of General Practice, Sir Run Run Shaw Hospital, School of Medicine, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou Zhejiang, China
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