GPStress

Work environment, patient consultations & stressed-out general practitioners

General practitioners in many countries are reporting increased levels of stress. This can have detrimental effects both on the physicians themselves and for their patients. In Sweden, general practitioners are reporting even higher levels of stress than their colleagues in other countries. General practitioners are also more stressed than other healthcare professionals, they take shorter breaks and run higher risk of being placed on sick leave due to psychiatric conditions. Causes of this increased stress level can in part be found in societal and healthcare reform where demands on meeting goals are increasing at the expense of the interpersonal aspects of their work. And in the increased complexity of individual patient consultations as tasks are transferred from hospital to primary care.

The purpose of this project is to shed light on the relationships between general practitioners' work environment, stress level and emotional reactions during patient encounters. The project GPStress (or Interpersonal and contextual causes of stress in general practice consultations: A focus group study, which is the full-length title of the project) will explore the factors contributing to or alleviating stress. The focus is on factors related to individual encunters with patients as well as factors related to work environment and overarching organisational demands.

The researchers are using grounded theory as the overarching methodology. This means that various methods for data collection and analysis can be combined, and new data is constantly compared with previously collected data. They will recruit general practitioners and residents in general medicine for focus group interviews where the doctors will share their experiences of stress.

The analysis will occur through thematic analysis with an inductive approach, as well as through the integration of data into an adjacent grounded theory project that focuses on general practitioners' ethical decision-making and the pursuit of quality in their work.