Psychological morbidity and job satisfaction in hospital consultants and junior house officers: multicentre, cross sectional survey.

Junior house officers have traditionally been the most distressed doctors in the health service. Recently, however, there have been reports of significant psychological morbidity in senior doctors such as hospital consultants. Previous studies found that levels of distress decrease with increasing medical seniority. Much of the organisational burden of recent hospital reform has fallen on consultants, while junior doctors continue to have their hours of work reduced. We investigated whether these changes had affected the relation between medical seniority, psychological morbidity, and job satisfaction.