Parental Stress in Academic Emergency Medicine Physicians

Recent publications have shown that women are more likely to leave emergency medicine at a younger age than men. We aim to describe the prevalence of parental stress in academic emergency medicine and its association with scheduling practices and desire to leave medicine.

Blinded survey sent to eight geographically diverse academic sites. Survey included five domains: academic rank and perception of progress, child and childcare characteristics, clinical scheduling practices, plans to leave medicine, and validated psychometric measures including the Parental Stress Scale (PSS: normal population score 35-45). Likert scale responses were dichotomized as either moderate/extremely likely versus less than moderately likely/unsure. Descriptive statistics were calculated, and linear and multivariate regression analyses were performed using STATA 16.

A total of 280 surveys were accessed, and 225 (80%) surveys had PSS completed. Of this cohort, there were 90 females, 123 men, 1 intersex, and 15 surveys had no sex reported. The median number of children was 2 (IQR 1-3), and the median age of the youngest child was 4 (IQR 1-9). The parental stress scale median score was 40 (IQR 35-46). There was no significant difference in the parental stress scale by sex. The number of children (B-coeff -1.88, p = 0.007), age of the youngest child (B-coeff -4.2, p = 0.000), use of daycare (B-coeff 3.8, p = 0.027), ability to preference times of shifts (day, swing, night shift) (B-coeff -2.4, p = 0.046), being a nocturnist (B-coeff 2.75, p = 0.006), and being able to completely set their own schedule in terms of days and times worked (B-coeff -2.19, p = 0.03) were associated with the PSS score. The parental stress scale was not associated with the likelihood to leave emergency medicine or leave the current job in 5 years.

Academic emergency physicians had parental stress scale scores similar to the general population. Parental stress scale score was not associated with a plan to leave emergency medicine.