Healthcare Workers Don't Always Practice What They Preach

"You can view that as maybe not bad news, but for us, that those numbers were essentially statistically equal between healthcare workers and non-healthcare workers was to us a bit of a flag."

The research project used statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, a telephone survey of 260,558 adults reporting 19 health behaviors in the United States in 2008 and 2009.

In a few of the health behavior categories, healthcare workers responded that they had behaviors that many said were less healthy than non-healthcare workers. For example, female healthcare workers over age 50 were 8% less likely than non-healthcare workers to say they had obtained recommended mammograms within the last two years.

And healthcare workers were 5% more likely to say they had consumed alcohol in the past 30 days than non-healthcare workers.

However, Mukamal says, those results may have underlying reasons.