Over the past 3 months, half of them have had a health problem.
“Work is health, doing nothing is preserving it. Prisoners at work don’t last long“, could be heard in Henri Salvador’s song widely used for social demands when it was released in 1965. If these words make you smile today, they are far from being out of fashion and the work would continue to weigh on the health of many professions, suggests the barometer for the Mutuelle Nationale des Hospitaliers (MNH) published at the end of 2024. To carry out this survey, the pollsters questioned more than 2,500 people (employed workers) about their work habits and their state of health and they revealed the profession which the worst impact on health.
“Over the last 3 months, 46% of them had a health problem compared to 28% in the general population, a gap of 18%.“, reports the study. More worrying, the state of mental health of these professionals has deteriorated since the publication of the last barometer: a third declared having poor mental health compared to 14% in the general population. This state of poorer than average health is explained, among other things, by more difficult working conditions: too much work (76% complain about it compared to 51% for the general population), incivility in more frequent work (45% vs 30%), as well as aggressiveness (31% vs and 27%) and stress at work.
They are also more likely to work at night than the rest of the workforce and also have poorer sleep hygiene on average: 61% of them are confronted with a sleep problem at least once a week compared to 48% in the general population. Finally, more than half of them consume alcohol, tobacco, cannabis or anxiolytics (tranquilizers or sleeping pills) at least once a week. So what is the most harmful job for your health? “Shoemakers are definitely the worst shod“, say the pollsters ironically since it is caregivers and hospital staff (nurses, caregivers, doctors) who are targeted here.
Many health professionals work shifts (weekends or nights), there are much fewer of them than others
Working French people to judge that their “professional life – professional life” balance is “satisfactory”. In terms of prevention, caregivers are less serious than their patients: one in two caregivers has never carried out a breast cancer screening exam (53% vs. 67% among French women). The only positive point from the survey: conflictual relationships with colleagues are less frequent among health professionals than in the general population (14% vs. 20%).