Pandemic management impacts Slovak health care workers' quality of life during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic

Veronika Pacutova; Andrea Madarasova Geckova; Peter Kizek; Sara Maria Majernikova; Andrea F de Winter; Sijmen A Reijneveld

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0283740

Pandemic management impacts Slovak health care workers' quality of life during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic

PLoS One. 2023 Mar 30;18(3):e0283740. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0283740. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Veronika Pacutova^{1

2}, Andrea Madarasova Geckova^{1

2

3}, Peter Kizek⁴, Sara Maria Majernikova⁵, Andrea F de Winter², Sijmen A Reijneveld²

Affiliations

¹ Faculty of Medicine, Department of Health Psychology and Research Methodology, P. J. Safarik University, Kosice, Slovakia.
² Department of Community & Occupational Medicine, University Medical Center Groningen, University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands.
³ Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences, Institute of Applied Psychology, Comenius University Bratislava, Bratislava, Slovakia.
⁴ Faculty of Medicine, Clinic of Stomatology and Maxillofacial Surgery, University Hospital of Louis Pasteur, P. J. Safarik University, Kosice, Slovakia.
⁵ Faculty of Life Sciences, Division of Biosciences (student), University College London, London, United Kingdom.

Abstract

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic led to accepting a lot of various protective pandemic management-related measures (PanMan), which may have had a large impact on health care workers (HCWs) but evidence is scarce. We therefore explored the impact of measures during the second wave. We assessed the associations of PanMan with the Quality of Life (QoL) of hospital HCWs.

Methods: We collected data from 215 HCWs (77.7% females, mean age 44.4), who were working at the COVID-related departments of one large hospital in eastern Slovakia via a questionnaire, specifically developed in direct collaboration with them. We assessed PanMan related factors, such as COVID-19 experience, information overload, non-adherence of the public, work stress, barriers and facilitators of health care provision, and QoL related factors, such as impact on family life and activities, housekeeping, relationships with relatives and mental well-being. To analyse the data, we used logistic regression models adjusted for age and gender.

Results: PanMan greatly impacted the QoL of HCWs, in particular family life, housekeeping and mental well-being (odds ratio, 6.8-2.2). The most influential PanMan factors were COVID-19 experience (3.6-2.3), work stress (4.1-2.4) and barriers in health care provision (6.8-2.2). Perceiving work stress had a negative impact on all QoL domains, even on relationships with the greatest impact. Conversely, the PanMan factors reducing the negative impact on QoL were training and colleagues' support (0.4-0.1).

Conclusion: PanMan had a strong negative impact on the QoL of hospital HCWs during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Copyright: © 2023 Pacutova et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Adult
COVID-19* / epidemiology
Female
Health Personnel
Humans
Male
Occupational Stress*
Pandemics
Personnel, Hospital
Quality of Life
Slovakia / epidemiology

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the Research and Development Support Agency under Contract No. VVGS-2020-1444, APVV-16-0490. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.