Mental health of staff working in intensive care during Covid-19
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Abstract
Background
Staff working in intensive care units (ICUs) have faced significant challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic which have the potential to adversely affect their mental health.
Aims
To identify the rates of probable mental health disorder in staff working in ICUs in nine English hospitals during June and July 2020.
Methods
An anonymized brief web-based survey comprising standardized questionnaires examining depression, anxiety symptoms, symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), well-being and alcohol use was administered to staff.
Results
Seven hundred and nine participants completed the surveys comprising 291 (41%) doctors, 344 (49%) nurses and 74 (10%) other healthcare staff. Over half (59%) reported good well-being; however, 45% met the threshold for probable clinical significance on at least one of the following measures: severe depression (6%), PTSD (40%), severe anxiety (11%) or problem drinking (7%). Thirteen per cent of respondents reported frequent thoughts of being better off dead, or of hurting themselves in the past 2 weeks. Within the sample used in this study, we found that doctors reported better mental health than nurses across a range of measures.
Conclusions
We found substantial rates of probable mental health disorders, and thoughts of self-harm, amongst ICU staff; these difficulties were especially prevalent in nurses. Whilst further work is needed to better understand the real level of clinical need amongst ICU staff, these results indicate the need for a national strategy to protect the mental health, and decrease the risk of functional impairment, of ICU staff whilst they carry out their essential work during COVID-19.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.11.03.20208322: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement IRB: The need for ethical review was discussed with two university ethics committees both of which confirmed that, as an anonymised audit and quality improvement exericise, the survey did not require ethical approval. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:This study has several …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.11.03.20208322: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement IRB: The need for ethical review was discussed with two university ethics committees both of which confirmed that, as an anonymised audit and quality improvement exericise, the survey did not require ethical approval. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:This study has several strengths and limitations. Amongst the strengths are the inclusion of a number of hospitals across the UK and completion of study assessments anonymously. A weakness of this study is the lack of participant demographic details which was done both for brevity and to preserve anonymity. As females, younger adults and those with dependent children are more likely to experience psychological difficulties, this information would be valuable in future investigations. Second, this study used self-report measures of mental illness rather than the gold-standard diagnostic interviews. Finally, it is possible that response bias occurred and those who participated had especially salient mental health difficulties they wanted to report. Future studies would be improved if either participants were randomly selected or a non-repsonder analysis was carried out. Despite these limitations, the results of this study allow for several recommendations. First, our results suggest that NHS managers should prioritise provision of evidence based staff support which is likely both to improve psychological wellbeing and decrease the likelihood of psychologically unwell staff delivering substandard care. Second, it is also necessary to ensure that rapid access to formal treatment is available given its long term positive benefits (e.g. reduced staff absence, improved quality of life). Third, supervisor and peer support has been found to be particularly beneficial in supporting oth...
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No funding statement was detected.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
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