Abstract
On March 11, 2020 the World Health Organisation declared the SARS-CoV-2 viral outbreak a pandemic. This rapid review aimed to identify the pandemic's impact on frontline healthcare workers during the viral outbreak's initial months. Database searches December 1, 2019 to August 29, 2020 retrieved 18 relevant studies. Findings showed that healthcare workers internationally were negatively impacted by the pandemic. Compared to non-frontline healthcare workers a significantly greater proportion of frontline healthcare workers experienced: burnout, stress, and stressors regarding: childcare, job interference with work-family balance and difficulty getting off-duty time. Compared to male physicians, a significantly greater proportion of female physicians scored low for psychological well-being. Mean scores for stress were significantly higher among females and young healthcare workers (22 to 35 years). Mean scores for anxiety were significantly higher for: nurses compared to technicians, healthcare workers reporting extreme lack of protective equipment and those aged > 30 years. The prevalence of depression among frontline healthcare workers across studies in this review ranged from 9% to 51%. The prevalence of sleep issues ranged from 24% to 60% with some reporting nightmares. However, these studies lack homogeneity. Healthcare workers experienced fear of: contracting the virus (89.8%), spreading it to family (91.3%) and fear of an uncontrollable epidemic (86.8%). Over 90% reported skin lesions due to prolonged use of personal protective equipment. Many lost their lives to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. One prominent impact of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is the reported loss of healthcare worker's lives and this paper wishes to pay them tribute.
Highlights
The novel virus (SARS-CoV-2) and its resultant disease COVID-19 were unknown prior to December 2019 (WHO, 2020a)
The terms risk-exposed (Kannampallil et al, 2020) and frontline healthcare worker refers to healthcare workers (HCWs) engaged in direct diagnosis, treatment or care of patients with COVID-19 (Lai et al 2020)
The survey results for this study showed that anxiety level on the (SAS Scale) were significantly higher for: (a) nurses compared to technicians (p = 0.001). (b) HCWs aged > 30 years (p = 0.011), (c) females (p = 0.004) (Independent t-tests) and (d) HCWs reporting extreme lack of protective equipment (p = 0.001, ANOVA) (Huang et al, 2020)
Summary
The novel virus (SARS-CoV-2) and its resultant disease COVID-19 were unknown prior to December 2019 (WHO, 2020a). On December 31, 2019, the world health organisation (WHO) was informed of cases of pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan, China (WHOb). Rapid person-to-person transmissibility (Wang et al, 2020b), high fatality (49%) among patients categorised as 'critical' and the viral spread from Wuhan to the entire country of China within approximately 30 days (CCDC-China, 2020) was an early warning that the virus could potentially become a pandemic. 1.1 Previous corona virus outbreaks of global concern and naming the novel coronavirus. The WHO and journal publications referred to the virus as (2019-nCoV) (WHO, 2020c; Wang et al, 2020a) and its disease was described as 2019 novel coronavirus: (2019-nCoV)–infected pneumonia (NCIP) (Wang et al, 2020b). Laboratory scientists in China, on January 7, 2020 isolated the SARS-CoV-2 virus and released its first genome
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