Relationship between psychosocial working conditions, stress perception, and needle-stick injury among healthcare workers in Shanghai

BACKGROUND: The present study aims to identify the association between psychosocial working conditions, global stress perception, and needle-stick injury among Chinese healthcare workers. It also endeavors to detect the mediating effects of global stress perception. METHODS: A total of 1956 valid samples were collected from eight teaching hospitals in Shanghai, China. A self-reported questionnaire was administered to participants after obtaining their written consent. Structural equation model was used to analyze the relationship between study variables. RESULTS: Most of the correlation coefficients between psychosocial conditions at work, stress perception, and needle-stick injury are of statistical significance ranging from 0.004 to 0.869. Results of the internal consistency test shows that Cronbach’s α is between 0.770 and 0.925. All three models for effect analysis demonstrated satisfactory global goodness and acceptable path loadings. Psychosocial working conditions and stress perception were directly associated with events of needle-stick injury, as 0.39 (95%CI: 0.32 to 0.48) and 0.32 (95%CI: 0.22 to 0.39), respectively. Furthermore, stress perception had been proved to have a mediating effect (0.25, 95%CI: 0.19 to 0.31) between psychosocial working condition and needle-stick injury, which occupied over one-third of the total effect. CONCLUSIONS: Both stressful psychosocial working conditions and negative stress perception could increase the risk of needle-stick injury that occurs among healthcare workers. Management of stress perception could reduce health risk brought by stressful psychosocial working conditions. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12889-019-7181-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.