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CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 · Ibnosina Journal of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences 2020; 12(04): 258-263
DOI: 10.4103/ijmbs.ijmbs_143_20
Review Article

Mental health of health-care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic

Walaa Mogassabi
1   Research Student, Al-Arqam Academy, Doha
,
Waqar Mogassabi
2   College of Health Sciences, Qatar University, Doha
,
Maram Saliba
3   Department of Medicine, Hamad General Hospital, Doha
,
Rana Emam
4   Department of Psychiatry, Hamad General Hospital, Weill-Cornell Medicine, Doha
,
Wanis Ibrahim
3   Department of Medicine, Hamad General Hospital, Doha
5   Department of Clinical Medicine, College of Medicine, Qatar University, Weill-Cornell Medicine, Doha
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Besides its effects on physical health, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has resulted in adverse consequences on mental health of health-care workers. Several factors such as safety concerns and fear of infecting self or family members, social isolation measures, strict infection control procedures, lack of protective measures, exhaustion due to increased duration of working, and seeing patients die or colleagues infected can contribute to the development of mental health problems in health-care workers during the current COVID-19 pandemic. Some health-care staff including nurses, advanced practice providers, frontline health-care workers, and health-care workers who have children are more vulnerable to these mental health problems. Prevention of infection and staff burnout in health-care workers, provision of a timely mental health care, and social support are among the most important measures to provide a mental health care for health-care workers during the current COVID-19 pandemic.

Key-words:

COVID-19 - health-care workers - mental health - pandemic - SARS-CoV-2

Financial support and sponsorship

Nil.




Publication History

Received: 16 November 2020

Accepted: 16 November 2020

Article published online:
14 July 2022

© 2020. The Libyan Authority of Scientific Research and Technologyand the Libyan Biotechnology Research Center. All rights reserved. This is an open access article published by Thieme under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonDerivative-NonCommercial-License,permitting copying and reproductionso long as the original work is given appropriate credit. Contents may not be used for commercial purposes, oradapted, remixed, transformed or built upon. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

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