Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health
Date Submitted: Aug 2, 2020
Date Accepted: Dec 14, 2020
Date Submitted to PubMed: Dec 20, 2020
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.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.