In China, nursing is a profession with considerable stress, which may cause both physiological and psychological problems. The present study conducted a cross‐temporal meta‐analysis of 244 papers using the Symptom Checklist 90 (SCL‐90) to investigate the changes in the mental health level of Chinese nurses (N = 71,286) from 1998 to 2016. Results showed that (a) relationships between scores of all nine types of mental problems in the SCL‐90 and year were significantly positive, indicating that the mental health level of nurses decreased steadily in the past 19 years; (b) relationships between three social indicators (patient‐to‐nurse ratio, unemployment rate, and divorce rate) and scores of all nine types of mental problems in the SCL‐90 were significantly positive, suggesting that the increase in these social indicators may be responsible for the decrease in Chinese nurses' mental health level.

No abstract