Objective To understand the current situation of health science popularization cognition of medical staff in Tianjin and the reasons that affect their participation in health science popularization, and to explore measures to motivate them to participate. Methods A simple random sampling method was used to select 617 medical staff from 65 institutions in Tianjin as the survey objects. The medical staff science popularization cognition questionnaire was designed. The contents of the questionnaire were entered and recovered through the Wenjuanxing platform. The survey results were sorted out and analyzed, and the χ² test was used to compare the willingness to popularize health science among different medical staff. Results In this study, 93.7% (578/617) of the medical staff identified with the importance of health science popularization and 90.7% (524/578) of them have willingness to devote themselves to the work, which was higher than the proportion of medical staff who keeps a mediocre attitude to the importance of health science popularization [73.7% (28/38)], the difference was statistically significant (χ²=11.02, P<0.001). According to the survey, a total of 89.6% (553/617) of medical staff expressed their willingness to devote themselves to health science popularization. However, only 31.1% (172/553) of the medical staff are willing to spend more than one hour per week for health science popularization. The main influencing factors to the willingness were busy schedule of routine work[75.0% (48/64)], insufficient capacity of health education [42.2% (27/64)] and lack of incentive mechanisms to support science popularization[21.9% (14/64)]. An average, 52.6% (325/617) of medical staff investigated were not aware of the internal policies, funding and incentive mechanisms concerned in their units. Conclusions The recognition of the importance of health science popularization among medical staff in Tianjin is sufficient, but the participation in health science popularization needs to be improved. We suggest government sectors concerned to optimize the organization and management of popular science education by medical staff through harmonizing the time for routine work and for science popularization, increasing popular science publicity and capacity building, providing policy support and financial guarantee, so as to fundamentally improve the awareness and enthusiasm of health science popularization by medical personnel.