Alert: health care professionals and stress impact during the COVID-19

Healthcare professionals (HCPs) on the front lines against COVID-19 may face increased workload, and stress. Understanding HCPs’ risk for burnout is critical to supporting HCPs and maintaining the quality of healthcare during the pandemic.

Large numbers of healthcare professionals (HCPs) on the frontlines against COVID-19 face high adversity, workloads, and stress, making them vulnerable to burnout.

• Burnout: Defined as emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and low personal achievement, is known to detract from optimal working capacities, It has been found to be driven by high job stress, high time pressure and workload, and poor organizational support.

We present a preprint article: Factors Contributing to Healthcare Professional Burnout During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Rapid Turnaround Global Survey (2020)

Method: To assess exposure, perceptions, workload, and possible burnout of HCPs during the COVID-19 pandemic the authors conducted a cross-sectional survey.

The main outcomes and measures were HCPs’ self-assessment of burnout and other experiences and attitudes associated with working during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Results: Burnout was associated with:

• Work impacting household activities
• Feeling pushed beyond training
• Exposure to COVID-19 patients
• Making life prioritizing decisions
• Lack of adequate personal protective equipment (PPE)
• Limited organizatins support

Implications: Athough the results have multiple limitations including a non-validated questionnaire, minimal demographic data collection, and sampling method using social media the institutions should put the emphasis in support these individuals as they face enormous stress that can negatively impact their emotional and physical well-being.

Some actions that proactively instituions should do:

• Develop a resilience training: resilience refers to an individual’s ability to handle stress and recover quickly from the effects of adversity
• Cut drastically the belief of  HCP feeling that their organization doesn’t value their well-being.
• HCPs should feel secure knowing that management care about them and the management are doing as much as possible to handle with the adverse situation
  
• Support for HCPs’ families,
  
• Provide PPE,
  
• Provide mental health resources

Acces to the preprint article (pdf available)

Final article

photo: Life

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