Psychosocial responses to COVID-19 among nurses in two hospitals: a mixed method study at Eastern Nepal

Abstract

Background

Most documented studies have focused on mental health status of health care workers during the pandemic but there are very few studies, focusing on mitigation of mental health problems among nurses.

Aim

To study psychosocial responses to COVID-19 and the effectiveness of intervention among nurses.

Materials and methods

A mixed-method study was conducted, including 278 nurses from two COVID-19 hospitals of the province by purposive sampling. Depression, anxiety and stress and a composite measure of personal financial burden scales for quantitative; and interview guide for qualitative data were used. A psychosocial strengthening session was introduced and the effectiveness of the program was assessed after 4–5 weeks of intervention.

Results

Mild, moderate and severe depression was found among 13.7%, 9.4% and 1.1% of the participants correspondingly. Mild, moderate, severe and extremely severe anxiety was found among 21.2%, 8.6%, 3.2% and 2.2% of the participants respectively. Stress was mild among 9% and moderate in 1.4% of the participants. Lack of PPE and fear of transmitting infection were found as frequent causes of problems. Mean scores of depression, anxiety and stress were significantly decreased after the psychosocial strengthening program.

Conclusion

Depression, anxiety and stress are common issues of nurses. Common causes of problems were lack of resources, fear of being infected and fear of transmitting to family members. The psychosocial strengthening program was effective in reducing the problems.

Keywords:

• COVID-19
• mental health
• nurse

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge all the participants for their active participation and hospital administrators of the study site for facilitating the study.

Author contribution

RP principal investigator, designed the study, intervention, data collection, analysis and manuscript writing, TS helped in conceptualising and designing study, intervention, review of the manuscript, SL helped in conceptualising and designing the study, intervention, review of the manuscript, AK supported during designing the study, data collection of level two hospital and helped in intervention. ES helped in data entry, drafting the manuscript and editing the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are not publicly available due to confidentiality issue and institutional policy, but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.