Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Among Health Care Providers Following the Israeli Attacks Against Gaza Strip in 2014: A Call for Immediate Policy Actions

Abstract

The findings showed that health care providers suffered from severe posttraumatic symptoms after exposure to prolonged war stress. This level of trauma among health care providers warrants intervention programs to reduce stress and trauma among Gaza health care providers after the war.

Post-traumatic Stress Disorder Among Health Care Providers Two Years Following the Israeli Attacks Against Gaza Strip in August 2014: Another Call for Policy Intervention

“…This study is a follow up of our previous study which was conducted two months following the attacks against Gaza Strip (Abu-El-Noor et al, 2016). In this study, we assessed posttraumatic symptoms among nurses and doctors in three hospitals two years after the August 2014 Israeli war against the Gaza Strip.…”

“…Therefore, nurses and doctors who started working at these units after August 2014 were excluded from this study. We used a census population that included all nurses and doctors who were working during the war time in the same departments and in the same three hospitals that were used in our previous study (Abu-El-Noor et al, 2016).…”

“…Choosing a score of 35 as a cut point was because it relatively falls in the middle of the recommended range between 22 and 44. Moreover; it was used in a similar study by Alhajjar (2014) and in our previous study (Abu-El-Noor et al, 2016).…”

“…The instrument was translated into the Arabic language in our previous study (Abu-El-Noor et al, 2016) by two independent bilingual researchers. Then the two Arabic versions were compared and double checked for accuracy until common agreement about a final translation was agreed upon.…”

“…Back-translation is a standard procedure for translating a research questionnaire from English to other languages (Kim, Schwartz-Barcott, Holter, & Lorensen, 1995). Reliability Coefficients (Cronbach's alpha) of the Arabic IES-R subscales were: 0.817, 0.779, 0.713 respectively, and 0.892 for total IES-R (Abu- El-Noor et al, 2016).…”