The challenges of the medical doctors working in the intensive care unit during COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Aim: Healthcare professionals working in intensive care unit (ICU) have been in the frontline from the beginning of COVID-19 pandemic. We aimed to evaluate the technical and psychological difficulties encountered by medical doctors working in the ICU of the hospitals within XXX University Faculty of Medicine during this pandemic. 
 Material and Methods: A questionnaire consisting of 52 questions was applied to the medical doctors working in the ICUs of Başkent University affiliated centers. 
 Personal protective equipment (PPE) includes; surgical mask, N95: N95 mask, face shield, glove, overalls, overshoe, goggles, intubation cabin. 
 Results: Out of the 73 ICU physicians who were invited to participate, 62 (84.9%) of them completed the survey. Out of 59.7% of the participants stated that they did not feel safe while caring for the patients. The most common reason for their insecurity was the fear of contamination (70.3%). Out of 69.4% ICU physicians stated that their anxiety level was moderate. It was observed that the anxiety level of ICU physicians decreased as the number of patients followed up increased (p = 0.025), the increase in the number of hospital beds was found to be significantly associated with increased anxiety level (p = 0.015). It was found that the presence of anxiety complaint increased the state of having high anxiety related to COVID-19 disease 28.3 times (p = 0.001). 
 Conclusion: We found that more than half of the physicians participating in our study didn’t have any problem of protective personal equipment (PPE) deficiency, which is one of the most important technical difficulties. Regarding psychological difficulties, we found that doctors who had anxiety complaints before had much more difficulties in managing the pandemic process than others.