Self-care for job stress in the workplace

In order to assess the significance of self-care in stress prevention at an enterprises level, a questionnaire survey was conducted. The questionnaire was mailed to 678 occupational physicians and 320 responded (response ratio 47.5%), among whom 229 (71.6%) were full-time occupational physicians. Forty-five percent answered that self-care was important and practiced it actively; however, almost the same percentage of occupational physicians complained that there ware no appropriate procedures for self-care, nor enough time to introduce them. When a comparison was made between full-time and part-time, the full-time occupational physicians showed a more positive attitude. The same comparison made based on specialties in mental-health demonstrated that the doctors with higher specialty had a more positive attitude toward self-care than those with lower specialty. The main procedures or techniques applied to improve job-stress were group lecture, personal interview, and/or questionnaire. The occupational physicians who applied psychological techniques, such as the autogenic training and/or the transactional analysis, were few in number, 17.8% and 14.8% of the total respectively. Both autogenic training and transactional analysis were applied by full-time and highly specialized occupational physicians. These results suggest that self-care is recognized as being important for preventing job stress and for promoting mental health of employees; however, the usefulness and effectiveness of each technique at the worksite should be evaluated carefully. Education of occupational physicians is considered be indispensable for the acceptance of autogenic training and transactional analysis.