Occupational stress and job dissatisfaction with health work

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study is to evaluate the association between psychosocial aspects at work and dissatisfaction among health workers in five cities in Bahia, Brazil. METHODS: The evaluation was based on different models proposed to measuring occupational stress and possible combinations between them: demand-control model (DCM) and effort-reward imbalance (ERI). We conducted a cross-sectional epidemiological study including 3084 health workers. The analysis considered the association between partial/full/partial (combined) occupational stress models (the variable “exposure”) and job dissatisfaction (the variable “outcome”). RESULTS: Dissatisfaction rate was 26%. Full DCM and ERI models were better than partial ones to investigate job dissatisfaction. After adjustments, the combined models presented more robust measures of prevalence ratio than models evaluated separately (PR 2.93; CI 2.26–3.80). CONCLUSIONS: The combination of models has shown greater capacity to identify situations of job dissatisfaction and provided more potential information to support actions for workers’ health.