An association between job stress, social support and insomnia among public health workers in Thailand.

Abstract

Sleep disorder is the global burden public health problem nowadays. Sleep disorders link to several health problem including mental health, cardiovascular diseases, and unintentional injury. Insomnia is a type of sleep disorders which have sign of cannot sleep or difficult to fall asleep, stay asleep or woke up at night, or both them. The insomnia rather difficultly to define, however an individual’s report is used to identify its severity. Public health workers is an occupation dealing with distribution and determinants of health-related among population. Those people work with the high pressure including workload, working hours, conflict between different beliefs, lack of concern from community, organize support, and infectious which leading mental health risk factors.This analytical cross-sectional study aimed to 1) access prevalence of insomnia and 2) study an association between job stress, social support and insomnia among public health workers in Thailand. The quota sampling technique was used to select participants among doctors, nurse, public health scholar and others whom work under the Ministry of Public Health, Thailand. A self-reported questionnaire was sent out via mail. Thai Job Content Questionnaire (Thai-JCQ) was applied to identify work related factors. Insomnia Severity Index questionnaire(ISI) was performed to classify insomnia level. Amount 325 participants were returned, the response rate was 90.6%. Binary logistic regression was performed to analyse the associations. The result found that, majority of respondents were female (80%). Average age was 35 years old and 67.69% graduated Bachelor’s degree. Average reported working time per week was 46 hours/week. 40% of them reported having enough monthly income without saving. More than half (52.6%) of respondents reported clinical insomnia. For job stress and social support, the results among clinical insomnia showed that 27.49 % had high level of job stress, while 43.27% reported low level of social support. Insomnia was associated with education level (P-value=0.03) and sufficiency of income (P-value<0.01). Job pyschological demand level and supervisor support level were associated with insomnia at p-value< 0.001 and p-value=0.04. In multivariate analysis, workers who reports high pyschological job demand level was increased 1.99-fold odds of having insomnia comparing to the one who reported low pyschological job demand level [OR = 1.99; 95%CI 1.24 – 3.00]. In addition, those who reported high supervisor support level was decreased 0.64-fold odds of having insomnia comparing to the one who reported low supervisor support level [OR = 0.64; 95%CI 0.41 – 0.99].