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Objective: The COVID-19 pandemic had a major impact on different areas of life, especially in the medical system. Because of the pandemic outbreak, the medical system was remodeled to treat COVID-19 patients in secure conditions. Those changes and restrictive measures have put pressure on individual adaptability. The present study investigated the stress of Romanian healthcare practitioners (HCP) and the capacity to deal with new bio-ethical issues that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Methods: We analyzed results from a survey on 97 Romanian HCP in several areas: personal experience with COVID-19, perceived emotional distress, and appraisal of bio-ethical principles respected or infringed during the pandemic in 2020. Results: Unlike previous studies, our respondents reported low to moderate stress levels. In addition, few bio-ethical principles were infringed on a personal level. Tendencies to sacrifice individual autonomy and make decisions affecting patients and co-workers were more prevalent among HCP with over 30 years of experience. Conclusions: Retrospectively, Romanian HCP in our sample appeared to share an embellished view of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Potentially related factors and coping mechanisms with stress are discussed.

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Objective: This article investigates the accuracy of individual and combined indicators based on different strategies for detecting noncredible performance as part of a new test for the continuous assessment of short-term memory. Method: In two independent studies, we assessed three groups of simulators, cognitively impaired patients, and nonimpaired community members with four tasks separated by a distractor. Results: Pairwise comparisons between receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves revealed significant differences between two clusters of indicators: mean recognition, inconsistent responses in recognition, and false positives (area under the ROC curves > .800) proved more accurate than delayed recall and false negatives (area under the ROC curves < .800) in discriminating simulators from patients. Likewise, both studies revealed that adding the false positives indicator based on cued recall to mean recognition incrementally improved classification accuracy (including sensitivity, positive predictive value, and negative predictive value ) compared with the recognition indicator alone. Conclusions: Our results support the association of two distinct indicators for the assessment of noncredible performance, of which one should be a forced-choice indicator.

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