Occupational challenges of healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic: a qualitative study

Abstract

To address structural determinants and healthcare workers’ (HCWs) physical, mental, emotional and professional challenges of working during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Design

Exploratory qualitative study with semistructured interviews. Collected data were analysed using thematic analysis.

Setting

This qualitative study was undertaken with HCWs who mainly worked in intensive care units in six non-profit hospitals in Vienna, Austria. Data were collected from June 2020 to January 2021.

Participants

A total of 30 HCWs (13 medical doctors, 11 qualified nursing staff, 2 nurse assistants, 2 physiotherapists and 2 technical/cleaning staff) who were in direct and indirect contact with patients with COVID-19 were included.

Results

Three overall themes resulted as relevant: challenges due to lack of preparedness, structural conditions, and physical and mental health of HCWs. Lack of preparedness included delayed infection prevention and control (IPC) guidelines, shortages of personal protective equipment combined with staff shortages (especially of nursing staff) and overworked personnel. Physical and mental strains resulted from HCWs being overworked and working permanently on alert to face medical uncertainties and the critical conditions of patients. HCWs lacked recognition on multiple levels and dealt with stigma and avoidance behaviour of colleagues.

Conclusion

To mitigate HCWs’ occupational health risks and staff turnover, we propose context-specific recommendations. The number of available essential workers in care of patients with COVID-19, especially nursing staff, should be carefully planned and increased to avert chronic work overload. Timely training and education in IPC for all HCWs is important. Providing supportive supervision is as essential as appropriate recognition by higher level management and the public.

SciScore for 10.1101/2021.05.11.21257030: (What is this?)

Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

Table 1: Rigor

Ethics	Consent: Those who agreed to take part in the study signed the participant consent form. IRB: The study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Medical University of Vienna and the Ethics Committee of the Town of Vienna.
Sex as a biological variable	not detected.
Randomization	not detected.
Blinding	not detected.
Power Analysis	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:

Limitations: We focused on the core topics but are aware that stressors of HCWs are more complex. Doing research during a pandemic posed several challenges, including reaching gatekeepers and interview partners. Interviews sometimes took place under rushed conditions, after clinical work and with overworked or tired HCWs. Consequently, some interviews may have been shorter than usual or may not have yielded in-depth considerations. Further, there might be more differences in experiences between professions and different occupational groups which we were not able to consider.

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.
Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
No protocol registration statement was detected.

Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.

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