Abstract
Background: Medical care workers experienced unprecedented levels of workload and pressure since the outbreak of COVID-19 started from the end of 2019. Little is known about its exact impact on medical care workers and related factors in China. Methods: A cross-sectional survey was conducted among 863 medical care workers from 7 provinces in China using standard questionnaires measuring adverse psychological outcomes including Impact of Event Scale-6 (IES-6), Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale(DASS)and related psychosocial factors like perceived threat, social support and coping strategies. Exploratory Factor analysis was performed to identify the dimensions of perceived threat by study participants. Multivariate regression was used to examine the determinants of adverse psychological outcomes. Findings: Posttraumatic stress (PTS) were prevalent in this sample of health care professionals, and 40·21% indicated positive screens for significant posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms. The proportion of having mild to extremely severe symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress were 13·56%, 13·90% and 8·57%, respectively. Perceived threat and passive coping strategies were positively correlated to PTS and DASS scores, while perceived social support and active coping strategies were negatively correlated to DASS scores. Nurses were more likely to be anxious than others among medical care workers during the COVID-19 epidemic. Interpretation: Adverse psychological symptoms were prevalent among medical care workers in China during the COVID-19 epidemic. Screening for adverse psychological outcomes and developing corresponding preventive measures would be beneficial in decreasing negative psychological outcomes. Funding Statement: Asian Regional Special Cooperation Fund of National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China and the Innovative Engineering Program on global health policy sponsored by Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences (2017-I2M-B&R-17). Declaration of Interests: The authors declare no competing interests. Ethics Approval Statement: This study has been approved by the Ethics Committee of Jining Medical University of Shandong province on February 12th, 2020 (approval number: JNMC-2020-KY-001).
Highlights
Medical care workers experienced unprecedented levels of workload and pressure since the outbreak of COVID-19 started from the end of 2019
Perceived threat and passive coping strategies were positively correlated to Posttraumatic stress (PTS) and DASS scores, while perceived social support and active coping strategies were negatively correlated to DASS scores
Adverse psychological symptoms were prevalent among medical care workers in China during the COVID-19 epidemic
Summary
Medical care workers experienced unprecedented levels of workload and pressure since the outbreak of COVID-19 started from the end of 2019. This study aims to identify the psychological impact of COVID-19 on medical care workers in China. Severe emotional stress had been reported during or after the infectious diseases outbreak among medical care workers in previous studies, including the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic [1], 2014 Ebola virus disease and 2015 Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) outbreak [2, 3]. It has been shown that the medical care workers experienced a high level of emotional stress, anxiety, depression and PTS during or even after the outbreak of the infectious diseases [4]. Little is known about the psychological impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on medical care workers in the most severely affected countries, including China
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