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Abstract
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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? The Australian College of Nursing in Australia (ACN), one of our leading professional bodies, identified this very concerning issue in 2016 as an urgent concern and called for action to reduce further loss of life (Australian College of Nursing (ACN), 2016). Unfortunately, this call for action has fallen on deaf ears as the deaths by suicide of nurses in Australia have continued even after the call for action. We cannot afford to continue to ignore the national and international evidence that signifies the seriousness of the issue for nursing and health service delivery across the globe.
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. Evidence tells us that disasters such as the current pandemic are known to be associated with negative mental health consequences including increased rates of suicide that lasted well after the disaster had ended (Brown et al., 2018). Given this knowledge, we need to take urgent action to understand how the COVID-19 pandemic may escalate nurse suicide rates even beyond the pre-pandemic high figures.
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. Studies conducted in the United States of America (USA) (Davis et al., 2021; Lee & Friese, 2021) and the United Kingdom (UK) (Groves et al., 2022) have reported similar findings. Women nurses in the USA had twice the rate of death by suicide observed in the general population and 70% higher than the rate for women physicians (Lee & Friese, 2021). The study by Davis et al. (2021) also outlined that the highest reported number of nurses on record in the USA died by suicide in the period 2017-2018. An Australian retrospective mortality study for the years 2001-2012 found that women nurses and midwives were 192% more likely to commit suicide than women in other occupational groups; male nurses and midwives 52% more likely to commit suicide than men in other occupational groups and 196% more likely to commit suicide than women nurses (Milner et al., 2016).
This is a serious concern given that these studies pre-dated the COVID-19 pandemic. We now know that during the pandemic nurses were required to work under extremely stressful workplace conditions and witnessed the deaths of many people in their care. This outcome placed nurses at significantly higher risk for poorer mental health compared with other health professionals (Kunz et al., 2021) and the public, at a time when mental health deteriorated globally due to factors associated with attempts to manage the spread of the coronavirus (Usher, Durkin, et al., 2020; Usher, Jackson, et al., 2020). Rahman and Plummer (2020) raised the issue of COVID-19-related suicide in hospital nurses, but still very little is known about nurse suicide in the context of COVID-19...
Language: en |