Impact of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder among Home Care-givers of COVID-19 Patients Visiting Tertiary Care Hospitals of Peshawar

Background The COVID-19 pandemic has exerted significant psychological distress on their patients but also on their family caregivers. Home caregivers to the infected people are especially exposed to stress related disorders because of the lasting exposure, the fear of transmission, and social isolation. There is, however, paucity in evidence on the aspects of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms among low-income and middle-income countries (including Pakistan) home caregivers. Methods The study was a descriptive cross-sectional study that was conducted at a time interval of November 2023 to September 2024, on 384 home caregivers of patients with COVID-19 in tertiary care hospitals in Peshawar, Pakistan. Recruitment of participants was done through consecutive sampling. A structured questionnaire was used whereby the Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R) was included to gather the data. Cross-tabulation and descriptive statistics analyses were conducted using SPSS version 25 and the level of significance was set to p < 0.05. Results A total of 384 respondents took part in the survey of which 348 responded to the survey and were used in final analysis. Most of the caregivers were found to have moderate to high PTSD symptoms. In general, 80.3% of the participants had a score that fell in the range of clinically significant psychological distress. Women caregivers had a high score in PTSD as compared to males (p = 0.015). Married participants had also more distress levels than unmarried caregivers. There were no major differences that were observed according to place of residence. Conclusion The home caregivers working with COVID-19 patients were under a significant psychological distress, and the prevalence of symptoms associated with PTSD was high. The female and married caregivers were at a disadvantage. These results provide a clear insight into the extreme necessity of specific mental health screening, psychosocial support initiatives, and gender-specific caregiver interventions during and after the occurrence of a public health emergency.