How Medical Staff Alleviates Job Burnout through Sports Involvement: The Mediating Roles of Health Anxiety and Self-Efficacy

In the current healthcare environment, job burnout among medical staff is increasingly evident. Burnout not only affects the mental and physical health and career development of individuals but also affects the quality of care and the doctor–patient relationship. This paper investigates the influence of sports involvement on burnout in medical staff based on the job demands–resources theory, focusing on the mediating role of health anxiety and self-efficacy in the relationship between sports involvement and job burnout. A questionnaire survey was used to collect data from 444 medical staff in public hospitals in Wuhan, China. Structural equation modeling (SEM) with a bootstrapping approach was conducted to test the hypothesis and mediating effects. It was found that health anxiety and self-efficacy played a significant mediating role between sports involvement and job burnout. The results indicate the important role that sports involvement plays in addressing burnout, revealing that decreasing health anxiety and increasing self-efficacy attenuated job burnout. This finding suggests that hospital administrators should not only pay attention to medical staff’s health conditions and improve their enthusiasm for work but also encourage them to become more engaged in sports.