Caring for Caregivers. The World on Alert for the Mental Health of Health Personnel

According to updated information from Johns Hopkins University, as of March 16, more than 461.8 million people had been infected with COVID-19 worldwide, of which more than 6 million lost their lives. because of this disease.

However, among those who survived, many presented several later effects that ended up harming their normal lives, even after ending the virus in their bodies.

According to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), some of these consequences are shortness of breath, tiredness, problems thinking or concentrating, dizziness, fever and, in some women, even disorders in their menstrual cycle.

However, many of these data are based on the symptoms suffered by patients whose bodies fought against the new coronavirus, but what about those people who, without having to catch the disease, suffer the ravages of giving their lives to be able to help human beings who needed them to overcome covid-19?

This is precisely what was studied by a group of researchers from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) who, through their 'Heroes' report, reveal "the impact of the covid pandemic -19 in the mental health of health service workers in 26 countries on four continents and how it is affected by a series of factors at different levels that could be interrelated: individual, family, work and social”.

In the case of Latin America, the research took into account health workers from eleven countries in the region: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Bolivia, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico, Venezuela and Uruguay.

How was the study group established?

As detailed in the report, in addition to doctors and the nursing team, other health professionals in the region were also taken into account, such as technical, administrative, auxiliary, cleaning, food and transportation personnel.

However, the total number of people who were part of the study is still uncertain for the researchers, since it must also be taken into account that in many countries there was not even personal contact with these workers, but the documentation necessary to know the reality in terms of mental health of this population was obtained from official State entities.

What is known is that all the people participating in this study were health workers over 18 years of age. From there, different variables were analyzed, such as educational level, sex, the number of people with whom they live, whether or not they had relatives infected by COVID-19, religion or spiritual state, among others.

Thus, according to the report, the number of participants per country ranged from 167 in Bolivia to 2,584 in Mexico, “and nine countries with more than 500 observations (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, Peru, Puerto Rico, Venezuela and Uruguay).

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What was found?

In order to establish the mental state of health workers during and after the high peaks of the pandemic (this is from mid-2020 to, more or less, the end of September 2021), factors such as discomfort psychological, depressive symptoms or suicidal ideas that they might have; In addition, the way in which these discomforts or symptoms were related to professional and personal factors, at the social and individual level of each one, was established.

In this sense, and among the entire range of analyzes and conclusions that were obtained, some of the most important results are:

Women, according to their level of participation in research, are the most used gender in the health sector: of the total, at least 73.2% are women . However, this does not mean that their economic income is equal to or higher than that of men; on the contrary, it is 23.7% lower.

Regarding depressive symptoms, the study found that between 14.7% and 22% of health personnel in the Americas presented signs of suffering from a depressive episode. This figure, like most of the results obtained, varies between the countries analysed. For example, while 3% of health personnel in Venezuela presented very high risks of suffering a serious depressive episode, this percentage increased considerably in Chile, with 15%.

For their part, the number of workers who reported having or having had suicidal thoughts varied between 5% and 15%. Now, the most chilling figure does not have to do precisely with the number of workers (doctors, nurses, assistants, administrative staff, cleaning people, among others) who presented mental crises during their service in the pandemic, but with the tiny number of staff who even reporting symptoms of depression, suicide or other slightly milder psychological distress received help from the authorities.

Of the total number of workers who said they needed psychological care, only between 11% and 25% said they had received it. This is less than a third of health personnel with mental illness during the pandemic.

“Among the most important risk factors were the need for emotional and economic support, feeling concerned about infecting family members, conflicts with family members of infected people, and changes in usual work functions,” the study added.

Lastly, he explains that just as there were factors that threatened the mental health of the workers, there were others that protected the decay of that area from its integrity: confidence in the handling of the pandemic by hospitals or the government, having children under the age of age, support among coworkers, and finding refuge in religion or other spiritual practices.