Healthcare workers have a higher risk for suicide compared to those who don’t work in the field, according to a new study published Tuesday in JAMA. Registered nurses, healthcare support workers and health technicians are more prone to suicide than people who hold other roles in the health industry, the data showed.
Researchers examined data from about 1.84 million adults who held jobs from 2008 through 2019. The team examined specific groups of healthcare workers: doctors, registered nurses, other practitioners who diagnose and treat people, health technicians, healthcare support workers, and social and behavioral healthcare workers. The researchers compared suicide rates in healthcare workers to those who didn’t work in the healthcare field. The median age of the people studied was 44.
Healthcare workers had a risk of 21 per 100,000 people. That compares to a suicide rate of 12.6 per 100,000 people for people not in the healthcare field. Nurses had a rate of 16 per 100,000, and health technicians had a rate of 15.6 per 100,000 people. Doctors weren’t at a higher risk of suicide compared to those who didn’t work in health, but the authors contend that doesn’t mean physicians don’t have an overwhelming stress load.
While men had a higher risk for suicide in general (among healthcare workers and among those not working in healthcare), women working in the healthcare field had a higher risk for suicide compared to men working in healthcare, the study found.
“There’s something about the gender roles and occupational experiences of women as health care workers that’s putting them at risk of suicide in a way that is not putting the men so much at risk,” Mark Olfson, a psychiatry professor oat Columbia University and lead author, told STAT.
The authors say the data shows that more attention must be given to people who work in the healthcare field.
September is National Suicide Prevention Month.
