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Richard Preece, Work-related stress: case definitions, prevalence and the NHS national surveys, Occupational Medicine, Volume 61, Issue 2, March 2011, Page 136, https://doi.org/10.1093/occmed/kqq200
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Dear Sir,
Whilst Houdmont, Cox and Griffiths [1] illustrate the challenges of measuring psychological illness attributable to work in the British workforce, it would have been good if the authors had referred to the annual National Health Service (NHS) staff survey in England (2003–09). These surveys have a much larger number of respondents than any of the surveys reported by the authors.
Over the period 2003–09, the proportion of NHS staff who said they had suffered from work-related stress in the preceding year reduced from 39 to 28% (Table 1).
The NHS workforce represents about 5% of the total British workforce. Even if no other workers reported any ‘work-related stress’, then the NHS prevalence alone would have explained just about all the cases suggested by the Self-Reported Work-Related Illness surveys.
The perceptions of NHS staff may not be reflective of other work settings. However, these large surveys illustrate two problems with self-reported data. It is difficult to meaningfully measure work-related psychological morbidity and the word ‘stress’ has limited value as a term to describe this morbidity.
