Medical Resident Doctors

Medical resident doctors endure a great amount of stress during their training. The medical residency generally involves three to five years’ additional training beyond medical school for physicians to gain additional knowledge within their specialization. The learning environment in which a resident physician works is generally fraught with high levels of stress as he fine tunes those skills that will make him a competent attending physician upon completion. This often involves erratic hours and working long stretches of time around the clock; often without a break or food. Morgan and King define stress as “an internal state that can be caused by physical demands on the body or by environmental and social situations, known stressors that are evaluated as potentially harmful, uncontrollable, or exceeding our resources for coping”.1
Vocational stress, as the name suggests, is related to the tress arising from the nature of work and more often, from the expectations and the outcomes from the work done. While this type of stress seems to be present in every workplace, the medical field is especially prone to this due to the nature of the medical treatment of others and interactions with the patient’s family who may be under their own stress due to the illness or injury of their loved one.
Many studies have looked into the stress and burnout levels of medical personnel, and it has been seen that the levels of stress are extremely high in hospital nurses3, surgeons4, general practitioners5, and resident doctors6,7. The goals of this study are to (1) estimate the prevalence of psychological stress in post-graduate resident medical doctors, and (2) to study the socio-demographic factors associated with psychological stress in this population.
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