Mental health status of Chinese physicians working in intensive care unit

Physicians working in intensive care unit (ICU) are prone to suffer from mental health problems, but there are still very limited data of mental health status of ICU physicians in China. Therefore, this study was to investigate their psychological status.

ICU physicians were contacted electronically and asked to complete the Symptom Check-list 90 (SCL-90) for Chinese from December 13 to December 14 in 2018. A total of 1749 valid questionnaires were collected. Fifteen potential relevant factors that could affect the mental health status of ICU physicians were also analyzed by multivariate logistic regression.

The total mean score of SCL-90 for surveyed subjects was 175.49 ± 65.79. Near half of the respondents were identified with psychological symptoms. The pooled estimates of all the nine factors, including somatization, obsession-compulsion, interpersonal-sensitivity, depression, anxiety, hostility, phobic anxiety, and paranoid ideation among ICU physicians, were significantly higher than those in the general population (P < 0.001). Multivariate analysis revealed that education, title, working hours per week, frequency of night shift were risk factors for psychological symptoms.

The situation of psychological health of ICU physicians in China is worrying, and it is urgent to take some effective measures to improve their mental health.