Psychological impact of COVID-19 on health workers in Ghana: A multicentre, cross-sectional study

Abstract

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic has exacted an appreciable burden on health systems globally including adverse psychological impacts on health workers. This study sought to assess COVID-19-related fear, depression, anxiety and stress among hospital staff, potential factors that may help reduce its psychological effects and their personal coping strategies. The study will help to highlight the psychological impact of COVID-19 on Ghanaian health workers and indirectly serve as a needs assessment survey for input to support affected staff and the broader health system. Methods: A cross-sectional survey was conducted among health workers in three hospitals in the Ashanti Region of Ghana from 11 July 2020 to 12 August 2020. Demographic data and scores from the validated DASS-21 and Fear of COVID-19 scales and two other scales developed de novo were entered from 272 self-administered questionnaires and analyzed for means, frequencies and proportions. Fisher’s exact test analysis was done to ascertain associations between selected independent variables and depression, anxiety, stress and fear. Parametric and non-parametric tests were used to compare the mean and median scores of the outcome variables across the three study hospitals. Results and conclusion: Over 40% of respondents had fear while 21.1%, 27.8% and 8.2% had depression, anxiety and stress, respectively. Positive attitudes from colleagues and the government’s tax-free salary relief were some factors said to reduce the psychological effects while over half of participants indicated praying more often as a coping strategy. There is a need for the health system to recognize the presence of these adverse psychological effects in health workers and take pragmatic steps to address them.

The global prevalence of depression, anxiety, stress, and, insomnia and its changes among health professionals during COVID-19 pandemic: A rapid systematic review and meta-analysis

“…HPs in Jordan faced the highest level of anxiety, in Canada the highest level of stress, and in Egypt the highest level of insomnia. The reverse scenarios (lowest estimates) were found for depression and anxiety in South Korea, for stress in Ghana, and for insomnia in Greece [28] (Table 3). The psychological tools that measured the highest pooled prevalence of depression of 47.02% using 9 studies [2,31,46,53,57,65,85,87,90], anxiety of 58.06% using 9 studies [2,31,46,53,57,65,85,87,90], stress of 69.46% using 5 studies [24,69,86,100,103], and insomnia of 46.58% using 16 studies [8,24,27,32,33,50,53,54,56,60,86,88,90,91,95] were HADS, HADS, PSS and ISI respectively.…”

“…the characteristics of the selected studies[2,8,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60,61,62,63,64,65,66,67,68, 69,70,71,72,73,74,75,76,77,78,79,80,81,82,83,84,85,86,87,88,89,90, 91,92,93,94,95,96,97,98,99,100,101,102,103,104], 30 of which were from China, 6 from Italy, 6 from India, 4 from the United States, 3 from each of Pakistan and Iran, 2 from…”

Effects of COVID-19 pandemic on ART Service delivery: perspectives of healthcare workers in a Teaching Hospital in Ghana

“…The rapid infectivity of the coronavirus however unsettled the health systems with a high proportion of infected patients requiring hospitalization [ 7 ]. The pandemic also affected HIV/ART services as several studies reported negative psychological effects on healthcare workers [ 8 , 9 ], decline in clinic attendance [ 10 ], and challenges organising services within facilities [ 11 ] which further impacted uptake and delivery of ART services.…”

COVID-19 and Psychological Distress among Older Adults in Ghana

“…Nania et al [2] also posited that adolescents' quest to understand the reasons behind social stratifications in their societies induce the feeling of anxiety and worry in them especially when they belong to the disadvantaged end of the spectrum. Psychological distresses are more prevalent among the young adult category (18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29)(30) and the older adult group (above 60 years) [3]. Vahedian-Azimi and others further explained that access to diversified information on social media incubates anxiety and some sense of worry among young adults whereas depression, which is induced by loneliness and regret, is common among people within the older age group.…”

“…Additionally, the few available studies were conducted in other jurisdictions outside of Ghana. The only known research on COVID-19 and psychological distress in Ghana was conducted by Ofori et al [27] to highlight the psychological impact of COVID-19 on Ghanaian health workers and indirectly serve as a needs assessment survey for input to support affected staff and the broader health system. Against this background, this study seeks to examine psychological distress among adults in Ghana in light of the pandemic.…”