Introduction:

Our health care system is a very demanding and stressful environment for physicians. Especially irregular working hours, heavy workloads, high emotional involvement and a large amount of bureaucracy are associated with increased stress and can have a negative impact on their health and wellbeing. Furthermore, work-related stress can affect the quality of patient care.

Method:

In order to investigate work-related stress, measured by the Effort-Reward Imbalance (ERI) scale, and the relationship with self-reported health status among physicians working in Upper Austria, a questionnaire-based cross-sectional study was conducted from September 4th, 2023 to December 3rd, 2023. Out of 1078 responses, 701 met the inclusion-criteria and could be used for the statistical analysis.

Results:

The average ER-ratio among physicians working in Upper Austria was 1.193. 65.8% of the 701 participants had a reward crisis, which is defined as an ER-ratio above 1. Moreover, a moderate positive correlation between the ER-ratio and self-reported health status (ρ=0.307, p<0.001) was found, which means that physicians with higher ER-ratios are more likely to report bad health status.

Conclusions:

The results of the study indicate that physicians in Upper Austria are at risk to experience work-related stress. Moreover, it seems that increased work-related stress is associated with poorer health. Therefore, it is important to take psychosocial stress seriously in the medical profession and to create work-environments that reduce effort-reward imbalance.