[Stressors in health occupations. Do females have a greater health risk?].

Stressors and health risks in medical professions are still largely ignored. A survey on different studies in nurses, students, doctors and dentists by this author is compared to results of other authors. Special attention is given to role-strain and health risks of women in health jobs. In nursing attention and care for patients is the most important stressor, followed by team conflicts, insecurity, lack of autonomy, workload and authority conflicts. Burnout is the most important shortterm health risk, longterm consequences are scarcely researched. Where direct comparison was studied nurses named higher stress values than doctors. The stressors mentioned by the latter concern great responsibility and decision-making under time pressure, workload, increasing criticism by the public combined with a demanding attitude. Female doctors in addition complain about the strain of emergency services. They especially suffer from the role-strain between job stressors and family responsibilities. Early signs of this stress combination can already be found in female students, but the whole career of female doctors is marked by it. Overall mortality of doctors decreased during the last decade when compared with the general population, but is still worse than that of other professionals of comparable education. Especially suicide-rates are high, for males 2-3 times, for females even 5-6 times that of the general population. This may be explained by a high toll of psychiatric diseases, particularly addiction and depression. All these facts are surprisingly little observed and reflected by the medical community when compared with increasing preventive activities in other job situations.