Psychological Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Health Care Workers

Introduction

The COVID-19 epidemic has appeared as a much more serious risk to national, global health, financial security, and how various communities and governments work. COVID-19 initially emerged in December during the year 2019 with a record of serious flu-like infection in China, in a province called Hubei in Wuhan town. This disease has dissipated quickly since it was discovered and has caused a lot of deaths globally. The infection spreads quickly from one person to another, and this has affected health workers psychologically since they get infected from patients they handle. These effects are anxiety, work stress and insomnia. This paper will talk about these psychological impacts.

The COVID 19 pandemic is straightly causing anxiety to the health workers as a mental problem. This pandemic has subjected healthcare professionals and their households to risk levels without precedent. (Tan, Chew, Jing, Goh, and Shanmugam,2020). Many health workers have been infected to date, and all of them fear to get infected as the disease is dangerous to someone’s health and causes death. To add on, Statistics from several nations across the World Health Organization regions show that health employees’ COVID-19 infections are far higher than those in the general public (Alfred and Shi 2020). This disease is not only leading to worries for health workers but also results in job stress to these employees.

The epidemic is also argued to be resulting in occupational stress to healthcare workers. A significant predictor of mental illness is workplace stress associated with COVID-19 as it can lead to depression in the competition of the co-occurrence of multiple deaths, and long job changes with one of the most complex uncertainties and needs (Que, Shi, Zhang, Gong and Ran, 2020). Health Care professionals are certainly needed during the international solution to the pandemic, however, they constitute the most endangered people in terms of contracting a highly infectious illness. Many Health Care Workers who assist at the front line during the pandemic have been infected, and they have been taken to quarantine, and some of them have lost their lives. Occupational stress also makes the workers in the ministry of health have insomnia.

It has been debated that the pandemic also causes lack of sleep among the health workers. The work stress on the Health Care workers also led to lack of sleep, particularly insomnia. Psychological problems, especially insomnia, have indeed been widely documented during the COVID-19 outbreak in frontline medical staff, in hospitals and are frequently followed by psychological distress. However, the standard of sleep has been largely measured by the use of personality tests, thus minimizing clinical relevance. (Greenberg, Docherty, Gnanapragasam, and Wessely, 2020). To add on, there was an observation that during the outbreak of COVID-19, front-line healthcare staff experienced more sleep disorders than non-healthcare practitioners, and their quality of sleep was worse. (Muller, R. A. E., Stensland, and Velde, 2020). This evidence shows that the COVID 19 pandemic directly causes insomnia to Health Care workers.

Conclusion

The COVID 19 infection is a dangerous disease in the world which causes psychological problems to Heath Care workers. In addition to this, it causes more death in many nations in the world on both the Health Care professionals and non-Health Care Workers. The ministry of health together with the World Health Organization to ensure good practice among the health workers to reduce these psychological problems caused by this pandemic to the Health Care Workers

References

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