Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health
Date Submitted: Aug 2, 2020
Date Accepted: Dec 14, 2020
Date Submitted to PubMed: Dec 20, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Psychological impact of COVID-19 on Chinese health-care workers
ABSTRACT
Background:
The outbreak of the 2019-nCoV has dominated headlines throughout the world. The number of infections continue to rise, which has reached 30 thousand at the time of writing this editorial. Because of the high risk of nosocomial transmission, the medical health-care workers may be experiencing significant psychological stress.
Objective:
This descriptive study aimed to identify hospital staff’s psychosocial effects associated with working in a hospital environment during the 2019-nCoV outbreak.
Methods:
57 frontline clinicians working in Wuhan First Hospital and 157 medical training students working in Jiangsu Provincial Peoples Hospital during this outbreak participated in our survey. The questionnaire we adopted included questions regarding the participants’ personal well-being, sociodemographic characteristics and the psychological status.
Results:
2019-nCoV had psychological impacts both on formal workers and medical students. The psychological effects include sleep disorders, anxiety and depression. There is no significant difference between the group of formal workers and medical students, and nearly 50% of the respondents reported pandemic-related mental disorders.
Conclusions:
Our study indicates that the high risk of 2019-nCoV exposure cause huge psychological stress on healthcare workers. This finding emphasizes the need of promoting psychological crisis intervention for medical personnel during this epidemic disease outbreak.
Citation
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Copyright
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