Caring for the carers: Advice for dealing with sleep problems of hospital staff during the COVID‐19 outbreak

Abstract

Hospital staff are at the frontline in the COVID‐19 outbreak. The stressors they experience may induce sleep problems in a population already at risk. Sleep deprivation, long shifts and insomnia in hospital staff have been associated with individual, organizational and public health hazards. These include increased risk of mental and somatic disorders, altered immune responses, medical errors, misunderstandings, drowsy driving and burnout. In March 2020, the World Health Organization called for providing access to mental health and counselling for health professionals involved in the COVID‐19 outbreak. To answer this call, we propose practical advice for the management of sleep problems (sleep deprivation, insomnia and shift work) that can be included in supportive interventions. The advice is based on psychobiological principles of sleep regulation and on guidelines for the treatment of insomnia and was implemented within an initiative offering psychological support to the staff of three university hospitals in Rome.

The psychological status of 8817 hospital workers during COVID-19 Epidemic: A cross-sectional study in Chongqing

“…As the most severe public health crisis in the recent half-century, COVID-19 pandemic has affected emotion, body, cognition, and behavior among hospital workers ( Williams et al., 2014 ). Many studies had found significant emotional and physical reactions to this crisis in hospital workers, such as depression, anxiety, PTSD, insomnia, and somatic symptom ( Ho et al., 2020 ; Kisely et al., 2020 ; Luo et al., 2020 ; Ballesio et al., 2020 ). Various sociodemographic factors were found associated to emotional and physical symptoms among hospital workers in this study such as lower educational background, female, and single, which were consistent with the findings in previous studies ( Kisely et al., 2020 ; Zhang et al., 2020 a; Luo et al., 2020 ).…”

“…Otherwise, the impairment occurred ( Zhang et al., 2020 a; Fava et al., 2019 ). Negative emotions (anxiety, guilt, and loneliness) were reported to activate cognitive mechanisms and result in poor self-rated health and high self-rated infected possibility ( Ballesio et al., 2020 ). However, compared with emotional and physical outcomes, epidemic-related attitudes and behaviors had showed a close relationship to stress and support in this study.…”

Burnout and its Factors in Healthcare Workers Involved in Providing Health Care for Patients With COVID-19 at Different Stages of the Pandemic

“…Было выявлено влияние тревоги, вины и одиночества на негативную оценку собственного здоровья и профессиональной успешности. Все это способствовало деморализации и уверенности в неизбежности инфицирования [20].…”

Circadian rhythm in the pattern of online usage of Facebook messenger during the COVID-19-triggered lockdown: a sequel to the pre-pandemic study

“…Further, there is a complete lack of research on the effects of the lockdown on circadian rhythms in humans (Bryson 2020;Erren and Lewis 2020). However, many studies have been conducted to evaluate the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on anxiety disorders (Huang and Zhao 2020; Sher 2020), depressive symptoms (Huang and Zhao 2020), sleep quality (Huang and Zhao 2020;Qi et al 2020;Stanton et al 2020), and mid-sleep timings (Sinha et al 2020;Majumdar et al 2020), although a majority of the studies is speculative and suggestive (Chen et al 2020;Yadav et al 2020;Mônico-Neto et al 2020;Ballesio et al 2020;Becker and Gregory 2020).…”