Impact of anxiety, stress, and burnout symptoms in Brazilian health professionals during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Aim of the studyOur study aimed to investigate the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on Brazilian healthcare workers who work directly with patients diagnosed with COVID-19.Subject or material and methods634 individuals divided into three groups. Non-health workers (n = 372) with a mean age of 36.6 years (SD = 9.14) and 85.5% female; Health Workers (n = 94) with a mean age of 37 years (SD = 7.97) and 90% female; COVID-19 Health Workers (n = 168) with a mean age of 36.23 years (SD = 7.97) and 90% female. We administer the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Checklist - Civilian Version, the Generalized Anxiety Disorder 7, and Burnout Inventory. We conduct data collection via Google Forms.ResultsHealth workers working in the front line in the fight against COVID-19 showed higher levels of anxiety and psychological distress when compared to health professionals who do not deal directly with COVID-19 and professionals who are not in the area of health.DiscussionOur findings suggest that health professionals who work on the front lines in the fight against COVID-19 tend to have higher levels of concern and anguish about the future, a high level of stress, mental tiredness, irritation, and fatigue.ConclusionsThe findings indicate that these public demands psychological and psychiatric support to face the pandemic's challenges

Latin American Scientific Production on Burnout in Scopus, 2010 - 2020

“…Cluster 1 (red) showed associations between burnout, health professionals and their public health implications. This result is consistent with the findings reported by Suñer-Soler et al (2014), who stated that health professionals are the most affected by burnout and that many of them quit their profession (Grau et al, 2009), along with its financial impact (Bethea et al, 2020), strongly accentuated by COVID-19 (Salvador et al, 2021). Cluster 2 (green) shows the methodological studies on burnout at a Latin American level and which is in line with what Salvagioni reported, who specifies that studies on burnout are developed based on different quantitative (Tabares-Díaz et al, 2020) and qualitative (Kulakova et al, 2017) methodologies and tools used to measure burnout (Salvagioni et al, 2017).…”

“…Brazil is the country that has contributed the most with 48.31%.This result is in line with the data shown in studies on burnout syndrome among Latin American teachers (Tabares-Díaz et al, 2020) and physicians (Buitrago et al, 2020). This is also interesting because Brazil is one of the countries most affected by COVID-19 (Salvador et al, 2021) and, therefore, Brazilian workers have suffered a greater blow due to the pandemic (Moreira & Lucca, 2020).…”

“…The topic of occupational burnout emerged as a concept in the United States in the 1970s and spread to Latin America in the 1990s (Schaufeli et al, 2009), showing a sustained growth in Latin American research (Tabares-Díaz et al, 2020) and gaining special prominence among health professionals (Perniciotti, 2019;Suñer-Soler et al, 2014) especially in relation to COVID-19 as reported in Argentina (Ibar et al, 2021), Brazil (Salvador et al, 2021) and Mexico (Robles et al, 2020). In light of this, this research aimed at analyzing the Latin American scientific research papers on burnout in Scopus from 2010 to 2020.…”

Burnout in COVID-19 era - a literature review

“…It consists of 20 items in a four-factor structure: Enthusiasm towards work, Psychological exhaustion, Indolence, Guilt. The answer key is a five-point Likert scale from 0 "never" to 4 "very often " [9]. COVID-19 Burnout Scale (COVID-19-BS)is a scale developed by Yıldırım and Solmaz ( 2020) that consists of 10 items and each item is rated with a 5-point Likert type scale ranging from 1 = never to 5 = always.…”

“…The group of health care workers struggling with COVID-19 showed higher levels of anxiety and mental exhaustion than the other groups (non-COVID-19 health care workers, non-health care workers).Interestingly, the overall scores for job burnout and post-traumatic stress showed no statistically significant differences and anxiety was the most differentiating factor. Employees struggling on the front lines are characterized by greater anxiety about the future [9]. Among Italian health care workers, those at high risk of burnout had lower resilience and greater difficulty coping with the uncertainty associated with the current SARSCoV-2 outbreak than the low burnout risk group [6].…”