Anxiety and Work Resilience Among Tertiary University Hospital Workers During the COVID-19 Outbreak: An Online Survey

For limiting COVID-19 spreading, the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommended worldwide confinement on 2010. In France, unessential institutions were closed on March 14th and population confinement was decided on March 17th.

Quarantine and/or confinement could lead to psychological effects such as confusion, suicide ideation, post-traumatic stress symptoms or anger COVID-19 outbreak highlighted a considerable proportion of health care workers (HCW) with depression, insomnia, anxiety and distress symptoms. In front line, facing the virus with the fear of contracting it and contaminate their closest. During previous outbreaks (H1N1, SARS), HCWs have been shown to experience such negative psychological effects of confinement as well as work avoidance behaviour and physical interaction reduction with infected patients (4-7).

In France, Covid 19 outbeak led to increase ICU bed capacity with a full reorganization of the human resources. Some caregivers were reassigned to newly setup units admitting or not Covid-19 patients. In the same time, non-caregivers were also encouraged to work at home whenever possible. Thus, every hospital staff member's private and professional life could be altered by the Covid-19 outbreak.

As all these changes in the daily life could induce psychological disturbances, the present study was aimed at assessing the acute anxiety level (main objective) of the staff in our Tertiary University Hospital, (6300 employees). Secondarily, the self-reported insomnia, pain, catastrophism and work avoidance behaviour levels were assessed