Incorporating the Outcomes of COVID-19 with Other Recent Pandemic Outbreaks on Healthcare Workers: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

Abstract

The community transmission of the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) has created a sense of panic and anxiety around the world. There is a rich pandemic-based evidence that shows the effect of disease outbreaks on the mental health of healthcare workers. However, inconsistencies and discrepancies have been observed among the findings of most of the reported studies. Therefore, this meta-analysis was conducted to identify the mental health issues faced by the doctors, nurses, and other paramedical staffs as a result of any health emergency. Firstly, databases of several web sources, namely, EBSCOhost, PubMed, and Google Scholar, were explored for searching the articles that dealt with the psychological distress faced by healthcare professionals during any pandemic. Thereafter, retrieved articles were systematically selected using specific inclusion and exclusion criteria. The quality of the included studies was assessed through guidelines of Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (STROBE). Meta-analysis was computed using R software (3.5.3) with “metafor” package. The present meta-analysis includes 49 epidemiological studies consisting of 59,552 healthcare workers across the globe. The results of the analyses indicated that 7% of the healthcare workers reported anxiety issues (95% CI: 0.42–1.01), 5% reported stress (95% CI: 0.29–0.69) and depressive symptoms (95% CI: 0.40–0.52), 8% reported sleep problems (95% CI: 0.53–1.07), and 6% reported post-traumatic stress symptoms (95% CI: 0.41–0.70) during COVID-19. Prevalence of sleep problems among healthcare workers was the highest during the current pandemic, as compared to previous ones. Hence it would be reasonable to conclude that medical healthcare workers involved in controlling any infectious disease outbreak are under increased psychological burden and hence and are at a high risk of developing and experiencing mental health problems. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.