BACKGROUND: The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) Is a major health crisis that affected 32 million people to date and caused death to 990,000 individuals. The impact of this pandemic on the healthcare system took its toll especially to the healthcare workers and its effect on their physical and mental health. We aim to assess severity of generalized anxiety, depression and subjective distress among medical, allied and ancillary healthcare workers (HCWs) who handled COVID-19 patients. METHODOLOGY: This is a cross sectional, survey based study done from Julyl to August 31, 2020 involving healthcare workers who handled COVID-19 patients in a tertiary hospital in Pangasinan. The selfadministered questionnaires used were the Generalized Anxiety Disorder- 7 for generalized anxiety, Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) for depression and Impact of Events Scale-Revised (IES-R) for subjective distress. RESULTS: A total of 417 of 450 contacted individuals completed the survey, with a participation rate of 92.67%. Majority were women (64.57%) and 53.24% were aged 19 to 30 years old. Sixty percent of the respondents were nurses, 25.9% were physicians and the rest were composed of medical technologists (6.47%), radiologic technologists (5 .52%) and respiratory therapists (1.68%). Subjective distress was noted to be present in 253 (60.67%) healthcare workers followed by anxiety 224 (53. 72%) and depression 184 (44.12%). Allied health professionals and male participants experienced anxiety the most as well as subjective distress. Depression was more severe among physicians (2 [1.85%1) and women (3 [1 .1 %1). Physicians and allied health professionals reported more severe degrees of mental health symptoms compared to nurses. CONCLUSION In this study, a significant proportion of HCWs especially physicians and allied health professionals involved in handling and treating suspected and confirmed COVID-19 patients experienced generalized anxiety, depression and distress.
Coronavirus ; depression ; stress ; anxiety ; mental health