Healthcare workers’ socio-psychological status after a year with COVID-19 pandemic: a cross-sectional faceto-face survey in Erzincan, Turkey

Abstract

Introduction: on January 7^th 2020, SARS-CoV-2 was identified in Wuhan, China, and on March 11^th, 2020, the World Health Organization declared it a "Pandemic". The aim of this research is to assess depression, anxiety, work, and social status in healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Methods: the research was designed to be a cross-sectional face-to-face survey. The study included 111 healthcare employees and 222 non-healthcare workers between the ages of 18 and 65 who applied to the hospital. For some reason, no one was excluded from the research. Socio-demographic and lifestyle-related questions, depression, anxiety, work-social adjustment scores, and pandemic-social status-operation connections were all assessed using a self-report questionnaire containing psychometric measures.

Results: the mean age of the participants in the study was 33.67±10.01 and 59% of the participants were female. PHQ9: 11.67±6.41, GAD7: 9.06±5.81, and W&SAS: 17.55±10.98 were the scores of the healthcare professional groups. PHQ9: 10.25±6.21, GAD7: 7.59±5.65, and W&SAS: 14.75±10.27 were the non-healthcare professional groups' results. When the PHQ9, GAD7, and W&SAS scores of both groups were compared, there was no statistically significant difference in the PHQ9 depression score between the two groups (p=0.107), the GAD7 (p<0.05) and W&SAS (p<0.05) scores of the healthcare professionals were statistically significantly higher.

Conclusion: in comparison to the non-healthcare worker group, healthcare professionals had the same level of depression, greater levels of moderate and high anxiety, and higher levels of work-social adjustment disorder. Unlike the literature, we found that the degree of depression fell to the same level as the non-health professional group in our study, but it was still disadvantaged in terms of anxiety and work-social adjustment.