Abstract
BACKGROUND: Common mental health problems (CMHP) are prevalent among junior doctors and medical students, and the COVID-19 pandemic has brought challenging situations with education disruptions, early graduations, and front-line work. CMHPs can have detrimental consequences on clinical safety and healthcare colleagues; thus, it is vital to assess the overall prevalence and available interventions to provide institutional-level support.
AIMS: This overview summarises the prevalence of CMHPs from existing published systematic reviews and informs public health prevention and early intervention practice.
METHODS: Four electronic databases were searched from 2012 to identify systematic reviews on the prevalence of CMHPs and/or interventions to tackle them.
RESULTS: Thirty-six reviews were included: 25 assessing prevalence and 11 assessing interventions. Across systematic reviews, the prevalence of anxiety ranged from 7.04 to 88.30%, burnout from 7.0 to 86.0%, depression from 11.0 to 66.5%, stress from 29.6 to 49.9%, suicidal ideation from 3.0 to 53.9% and one obsessive-compulsive disorder review reported a prevalence of 3.8%. Mindfulness-based interventions were included in all reviews, with mixed findings for each CMHP.
CONCLUSIONS: The prevalence of CMHPs is high among junior doctors and medical students, with anxiety remaining relatively stable and depression slightly increasing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Future research on mindfulness-based interventions is required for a resilient and healthy future workforce.
PRISMA/PROSPERO: the researchers have followed PRISMA guidance. This overview was not registered with PROSPERO as it was conducted as part of an MSc research project.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Number of pages | 37 |
| Journal | Journal of Mental Health |
| Early online date | 7 Nov 2023 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - 7 Nov 2023 |
Keywords
- Common mental health problems
- medical students and/or
- prevalence
- interventions
- overview of systematic reviews
Access to Document
- Alijuwaiser_etal_JMH_Common_Mental_Health_VoR
© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group .This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.