Suicide among health professionals in Australia: A retrospective mortality study of trends over the last two decades

Abstract

Objective: To examine the relative risk of suicide among healthcare professionals compared to other occupations and examine changes in suicide rates over time. Methods: Suicide cases were identified using the National Coronial Information System and were included if they were recorded as a death by intentional self-harm between 2001 and 2017 and were by an employed adult aged 20–69 with a known occupation at the time of death. Suicide methods were reported descriptively. Workforce data at the population level was extracted from the Australian Bureau of Statistics 2011 Census. Age-standardised suicide rates per 100,000 person-years for each of the four occupational groups were calculated using direct standardisation and using the Australian Bureau of Statistics population-level data from the 2011 Census. Negative binomial regression was used to estimate suicide risk by healthcare employment status and profession, to investigate differences by sex and to examine trends in suicide rates over time, using rate ratios and 95% confidence intervals. Results: Healthcare professionals were at increased risk of suicide compared to other occupations (rate ratio = 1.30, 95% confidence interval = [1.19, 1.42], p < 0.001), controlling for age, sex and year of death. Nurses and midwives were identified as being at significantly increased risk of suicide (rate ratio = 1.95, 95% confidence interval = [1.73, 2.19], p < 0.001). Suicide rates among female medical practitioners increased substantially over time ( p = 0.01). Conclusion: Health professionals are at significantly increased risk of suicide, though the relative risk of different groups is changing over time. There has been a substantial increase in the risk of suicide among female medical practitioners with rates of suicide in this group more than doubling over the last two decades. Findings highlight the need for targeted suicide prevention initiatives for healthcare professionals.

Nurses were at high risk of suicide before the COVID‐19 pandemic: Is the worst still to come?

“…Reports of high suicide rates for health professionals such as first responders (firefighters, paramedics for example) and medical physicians are commonly highlighted in the media while disturbingly high suicide rates in nurses, seem to go unrecognized. Previous studies have clearly identified the rates of suicide in nurses (Basu et al, 2023;Davis et al, 2021;Petrie et al, 2023) that are alarmingly high when compared to the general population. Why then has this serious issue gone relatively unnoticed?…”

“…In a recent review of the literature, Basu et al (2023) concluded that a multiplicity of individual, interpersonal and adverse workplace factors mean that nurses are at risk of dying by suicide. Other significant factors placing nurses and midwives at higher risk are knowledge of lethality and low rates of seeking help for mental health issues comparative to mental health issues including depression (Petrie et al, 2023). Given the current global shortage of nurses (International Council of Nurses (ICN), 2021; Jester, 2023), and the potential for these suicide rates to have worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic, immediate action to resolve this problem is needed.…”

“…In Australia, a study of suicide rates of health professionals conducted between 2001 and 2017 found that nurses and midwives had double the risk of suicide compared with other health professionals (Petrie et al, 2023). This finding is consistent with those in other countries.…”

Why Do We Agree to Disagree? Agreement and Reasons for Disagreement in Judgements of Intentional Self-Harm from Coroners and a Suicide Register in Queensland, Australia, from 2001 to 2015

“…In the context of suicide mortality, the NCIS has been used for key, informative, nationwide studies in Australia, such as the suicides of different occupational groups [15][16][17][18][19][20][21] and youth [22]. However, researchers acknowledge that the NCIS may underreport the occurrence of suicide [3,13,16], due to a lack of standardization between coroners and across jurisdictions [7,23].…”

The mental health of health and aged care workers in Australia

“…We have known for many years that large numbers develop symptoms of depression or anxiety, but many find the barriers to seeking help too great to overcome 1 . This burden of untreated symptoms, combined with factors such as knowledge of and access to means, has led to health professionals (including nurses) having a 30% higher risk of suicide than people in other occupations 2 . But concern about the mental health of our health care workers has surged since COVID‐19, with many reporting feeling traumatised and exhausted.…”