Young hospital pharmacists’ job stress and career prospects amidst the COVID-19 pandemic in China

BACKGROUND: Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic posed a critical threat to public health in the past year and has not been fully controlled so far. The nature of front-line young hospital pharmacists’ occupation puts them at an increased risk of contracting any contagious disease, including COVID-19. Recent survey indicated that hospital pharmacists in China are depressive, hostile amid the pandemic. AIM: The present investigation aims to understand the job stress among young hospital pharmacists during the outbreak of COVID-19 and to provide basic information for pharmacy managers to help young fellows to cope with job stress. METHOD: This study is adopting pharmacist job stress questionnaire as the key instrument of data collection through WJX App in mobile phone. Demographic information, career prospects and stress management proposals were obtained synchronously. Quantitative data were processed with SPSS. Significant differences were examined using analysis of variance and Chi-square analysis. RESULT: About 60% of 289 questionnaire respondents complained of job stress (178 respondents). According to the narrative description of the data, young pharmacists’ gender, education background, hospital grade, and specific work post had no significant effect on job stress difference. However, young pharmacists in different age-groups and professional titles showed different job stress. Pharmacists at the age of 31–35 complained more stress than the others. Pharmacists with high professional title (deputy chief pharmacist) complained more stress than the others. About 65% of 289 respondents had long-term plan for their practice, although 61% of young pharmacists felt troubled or worried with their future. As for stress management proposal, almost all young pharmacists hoped to improve their professional identity via raising their wages. CONCLUSION: More than half of young pharmacists suffer from job stress amidst the COVID-19 pandemic in China, and various intervention measures should be taken to relieve the stress and finally improve their social identity.