A Study on the Work of Primary Care Physicians in Chongqing during the COVID-19 Epidemic

Abstract

Since the outbreak of the novel coronavirus outbreak in 2019, China has entered the stage of regular prevention and control. Grassroots doctors are the first line of defense in the prevention and control of infectious diseases, and play a fundamental and vital role, but their work deployment needs to be further optimized. This paper adopts the method of random cluster sampling to conduct a questionnaire survey on 259 primary doctors from 12 community health service centers in the main urban area of Chongqing from August to September 2022, and analyzes their work content, working hours, time allocation and workload, so as to explore the balance point of work allocation under major public health events. The results showed that during the epidemic, 70.27% of Chongqing's primary care physicians worked more than 6 days per week, and 97.68% of them participated in the epidemic prevention and control tasks on the basis of the original workload. The top three tasks were nucleic acid sampling, home and isolation observation, and COVID-19 vaccination, accounting for 90.3%, 29.3%, and 23.6% respectively; At the same time, the results also showed a heavy workload, with a total mental load value of 41.71 ± 12.46. There was a positive correlation between weekly working hours and mental load. The longer the weekly working hours, the greater the total mental load value. Primary care physicians have made positive contributions to the prevention and control of the epidemic in China, but they undertook too many tasks and too much mental heavy mental load. It's necessary to optimize working hours, reduce work intensity, strengthen the construction and rational distribution of primary care physicians, so as to achieve effective response to infectious diseases and public health emergencies.