The Impact of the Coronavirus Pandemic on US healthcare workers: A Discursive Analysis of Frontline Secondary Traumatic Stress Using Twitter Data

Abstract

The demands of the COVID-19 pandemic have resulted in an increased physical, clinical, and emotional workload for healthcare workers. Both the Veterans Affairs system and the Emergency Nurses Association have recognized the specific hazards and health risks of providing frontline care in this unprecedented global emergency including an increase in multiple factors associated with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The purpose of this study was to explore real time PTSD in US healthcare workers using Twitter posts and to describe the impact on healthcare workers as the pandemic unfolds across the US. 1000 tweets were randomly selected from a larger dataset of 443,918 tweets by 281,021 unique authors posted using the hashtags #getmePPE and #getusPPE. Directed content analysis and discourse analysis were used to analyze the tweets and place them into a larger conversation about the pandemic. Healthcare workers and others, using a digital community setting delineated by the hashtags #GetUSPPE and #GetmePPE created a conversation centering around fear of illness, alarm at pandemic spread, and frustration at the label of “hero”, which is unsupported by resources at the local or Federal level. healthcare workers as a group have grave concerns, and high stress levels about inadequate material support (specifically personal protective equipment, or “PPE”) during the first 3 months of the Covid-19 pandemic. Real time analysis using social media posts as a dataset is a useful and feasible methodological approach for explicating the healthcare discourse within the social and political context of this pandemic. Keywords: emergency care; secondary traumatic stress; Covid-19; discourse analysis; emotional workload