Cross-sectional Study to Assess Psychological Impact of COVID-19 on Health Care Staff Working in a Tertiary Care Teaching Hospital

The COVID-19 pandemic has placed an enormous strain on healthcare professionals who have been at war with the virus since a year now. It was important to understand the mental health care impacts so that timely interventions could be provided to those who were in need of support. This would provide them with the much-needed support as well as prevent them from burn out. However, understanding healthcare professionals’ innate capacities of resilience and proactive coping was important to provide a holistic picture. This project studied the stress, anxiety, resilience and proactive coping levels of 151 hospital staffers at a designated COVID-19 tertiary care teaching institution in Pune district. They were administered the four scales and it was found that most were experiencing moderate stress levels, normal levels of anxiety and scored high on resilience and proactive coping measures. A significant negative correlation between anxiety and resilience and positive correlation between resilience and coping was found. This study shows that adequate support from the hospital, innate reserves of resilience and adequate coping techniques were protective factors, preventing the distress levels from culminating into mental illness. The sample’s mean age of 34 years could have also been a positive factor. However, it is important to further study the chronic effects of stress on mental health and burnout, given the pandemic is ongoing.