Psychological Impact of COVID-19 Outbreak on Caregivers

Based on the experience of previous pandemics, countries reacted by applying different upgrade strategies to prevent or delay the widespread of the disease. Therefore, measures such as border closure, school closure, restrict social gathering (even shutdown of workplaces), limit population movements, and confinement meaning quarantines at the scale of cities or regions. In public hospitals, several measures have been decided to concentrate the power of care on potential wave of admissions of patients with severe forms of Covid-19. In this purpose, the number of available beds in Intensive Care Units (ICU) has been increased by two-fold and scheduled non-emergency surgical procedure have been cancelled. That means:

1. For the most severe patients, new personals (physician such as anesthesiologists, nurses of other units) have been transferred in ICUs. 2. For the less severe patients, personals of non-busy units have been transferred in busier ones.

All these measures lead to major daily-life change sets that could be stressful. In the general population, it has been well documented that quarantine or confinement or isolation could lead to the occurrence of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) syndrome in about 30% overall population. Importantly, high depressive symptoms have been reported in 9% of hospital staff. Numerous symptoms have been reported after quarantine or isolation such as emotional disturbance, depression, stress, low mood, irritability, insomnia, and post-traumatic stress symptoms.

In hospital setting, few studies have been performed for assessing the psychological impact of quarantine and isolation. However, two studies reported a high prevalence of burn-out syndrome (BOS) in ICU physician and PTSD syndrome and depression in ICU nurses. As the consequences of all the measures decided and applied during Covid-19 pandemic could be important on caregivers, the present study primarily aims at assessing the prevalence of PTSD syndrome in a large population of caregivers implied or not in Intensive Care Units. The secondary objective were 1) to assess the prevalence of severe depression and anxiety and BOS 2) to isolate potential factors associated with PTSD, severe depression, anxiety or BOS.