Investigating the Effect of Appropriate Personal Protective Equipment on the Stress Level of Care Workers in the Covid19 Epidemic

Abstract

Importance: Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an infectious disease which caused by a newly discovered coronavirus Objective: The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of access to personal protective equipment on the level of stress of care workers in epidemic conditions. Design, settings, and participants: This study is hospital - based and which has been donein two stages. The first phase was performed in February 2020, when the disease had justspread and there were insufficient personal protective equipment, and the second phase wasperformed in February 2021, when it was more than 1 year since the outbreak. The disease wasover and personal protective equipment of sufficient quality was provided to the hospital staff.Census method was used to determine the number of participants in the study. In this study,the researchers conducted their research on all people. They gave the questionnaire to allfront-line care worker second-line care worker of Jam Hospital, which was 537 people. In thefirst stage, 472 questionnaires were filled out. In the second stage, 342 questionnaires werefilledout. Main outcomes and measures: We focused on symptoms of job stress in Jam Hospital staff. The same questionnaire was used in both stages. Data collection tool is a questionnaire (ENSS) Scale is a revised version of the NSS Nursing Stress Scale developed by Gary Taft andAnderson (1981). NSS is the first tool designed to measure nursing stress instead of overall jobstress. Thirty-four items of the NSS questionnaire measure the frequency and main sources ofstressin thepatientcaresituation. Results: In the first stage of the research, the level of satisfaction with the quality and availability of personal protective equipment Was 2.9%, stress level was high in 69.6% of employees (stress level was high in 65.3% of front line employees and 74% of second line employees).In the second phase of the study, when the level of employee satisfaction with personal protective equipment reached 97.3%, the level of stress was high in 44.1% of employees (the level of stress was high in 57.2% of front line employees and 31.1% of second line employees). That is, it decreased by 25.5%. In both stages of the research, the amount of stress has a significant relationship with the place of work (first stage p valu=0.013 , second stage p valu= 0.01) and there is no significant relationship between the amount of stress, gender, shift work and education