Abstract
The wellbeing and emotional resilience of healthcare workers are key components in maintaining essential health care services during the COVID-19 virus outbreak and beyond. This survey, distributed to physiatry trainees who were redeployed as general medicine physicians taking care of COVID-19 positive patients, sought to find out how trainees were dealing with the existing crisis and to identify their coping strategies used at this time of extreme uncertainty. Trainee wellness and burnout were objectively measured using the Physician Well Being Index (PWBI) and the Maslach Burnout Inventory-Human Services Survey (MBI-HSS) respectively. Independent qualitative analysis was applied to the survey’s free response section, which revealed trainees predominantly relied on pro-social coping mechanisms during this time. It furthermore highlighted that trainees desired strong leadership and system wide initiatives geared towards increasing transparency and communication amongst staff. Investigating trainee response at a time of abnormal stress can help trainee programs and hospital systems determine how to implement future initiatives that proactively protect trainee’s mental health in the short and long term.
Highlights
The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic applied immense pressure on national healthcare systems [14]
Surveys of healthcare workers from China early in this COVID-19 pandemic found that health care providers taking care of COVID-19 positive patients were significantly more susceptible to depression, anxiety, insomnia and distress compared to providers who did not care directly for COVID-19 patients [21]
Surveys were sent to all 21 Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation (PM&R) residents as well as the seven fellows within Brain Injury Medicine, Spinal Cord Injury Medicine and Sports Medicine, for a total of 28 trainees
Summary
The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic applied immense pressure on national healthcare systems [14]. Trainees of the Department of Rehabilitation and Human Performance at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai were repurposed from their traditional duties and assumed roles as the primary medical teams for COVID19 positive patients at The Mount Sinai Hospital and Elmhurst Hospital systems [3]. As it was observed in the past during the SARS outbreak in 2005, sources of psychological distress come from the sense of loss of control and vulnerability, fear for self-health and the potential spread of the virus [20]. Even basic personal logistics such as difficulties with transportation to and from work, obtaining proper childcare, and sustaining periods of isolation from family members in between shifts proved to be a significant source of stress to healthcare workers [14]
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