Comparing the mental health trajectories of four different types of keyworkers with non-keyworkers: 12-month follow-up observational study of 21 874 adults in England during the COVID-19 pandemic
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Abstract
There are concerns that keyworkers may be at a greater risk for psychological distress than non-keyworkers during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, little research has included keyworkers outside of the healthcare sector or has disaggregated keyworkers into different subgroups.
Aims
To examine longitudinal changes in mental health over 12 months during the COVID-19 pandemic comparing four different groups of keyworkers with non-keyworkers.
Method
Longitudinal data were from 21 874 adults living in England (21 March 2020 to 22 February 2021). Latent growth modelling was utilised to compare growth trajectories of depressive and anxiety symptoms in non-keyworkers and four types of keyworkers: (a) health and social care workers, (b) teachers and child care workers, (c) public service workers, and (d) essential services keyworkers (such as food chain or utility workers).
Results
When accounting for both time-invariant and time-varying covariates, keyworkers in the essential services category had consistently higher levels of depressive and anxiety symptoms than non-keyworkers across the whole of the study period. There was little difference in the mental health trajectories between health/social care, teachers/child care and public service worker categories and non-keyworkers.
Conclusions
Our findings suggest that the risk for poorer mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic varies within the broad category of keyworkers generally, and that those working in utility, food chain and transport roles are especially at risk. Future research should focus on identifying which aspects of working conditions may be contributing to occupational stress in these groups.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.04.20.21255817: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics IRB: The study was approved by the UCL Research Ethics Committee [12467/005] and all participants gave informed consent.
Consent: The study was approved by the UCL Research Ethics Committee [12467/005] and all participants gave informed consent.Sex as a biological variable not detected. Randomization The study did not use a random sample design and therefore the original sample is not representative of the UK population. 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 LimitationRe…SciScore for 10.1101/2021.04.20.21255817: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics IRB: The study was approved by the UCL Research Ethics Committee [12467/005] and all participants gave informed consent.
Consent: The study was approved by the UCL Research Ethics Committee [12467/005] and all participants gave informed consent.Sex as a biological variable not detected. Randomization The study did not use a random sample design and therefore the original sample is not representative of the UK population. 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:Despite these strengths, the limitations of our study raise important points for future search on mental health amongst key workers. First, despite the effort to make our sample representative to the working population in England, there is still the possibility of potential biases due to omitting other demographic factors that could be associated with survey participation in the weighting process. Second, we were only able to analyse data with respondents who reported themselves in government identified ‘key worker’ roles at the start of the pandemic, but the definition of this changed throughout the pandemic. Future study is required to capture how changes in key worker status designation may have impacted mental health of these groups. Moreover, we lacked data on participants’ mental health prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. It therefore remains unclear whether the levels of depressive and anxiety symptoms had already been consistently high amongst the key workers in sectors such as utility, food-chain, transport, and delivery prior to COVID-19, or whether the conditions exacerbated their mental health during the pandemic. Future research is encouraged to look at the longer-term mental health trajectories of key worker in these groups, including after the current pandemic is under control. Although due to our large sample size we were able to examine more key worker categories than prior studies, there was still some heterogeneity within the key worker groups in our study. Due...
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.
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