Covid-19 Impacts on Florida's Healthcare Professionals

Maintaining the Psychological Well-Being of Physicians in the Uncertain Work Environment: A Practitioners Perspective

COVID-19 significantly altered the healthcare ecosystem and forced us to stretch the capacity to ensure healthcare delivery services. Physicians were on the frontline and acted as an important cog in the wheel of healthcare delivery. This unprecedented situation forced them to adopt to a new norm amidst uncertainty, potentially impacting their mental well-being and overall health. The study aims to investigate the coping strategies for physicians to maintain their psychological well-being during uncertain events such as COVID-19. By employing Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), the research prioritizes coping strategies that can improve physicians' psychological well-being. This study affirms that the physicians working in healthcare during pandemic preferred adaptive strategies over maladaptive strategies. Maintained exercise, yoga/meditation (or similar), and behavioral disengagement are the three most preferred coping strategies. The study will benefit physicians and the policy makers, to achieve their agenda of enhancing physicians' psychological resilience during uncertain events, ultimately contributing to the continuity and quality of healthcare delivery.

Examining Healthcare Professionals’ Telehealth Usability before and during COVID-19 in Saudi Arabia: A Cross-Sectional Study

COVID-19 has placed substantial stress on healthcare providers in Saudi Arabia as they struggle to avoid contracting the virus, provide continued care for their patients, and protect their own families at home from possible exposure. The demand for care has increased due to the need to treat COVID-19. This pandemic has created a surge in the need for care in select healthcare delivery specialties, forcing other nonurgent or elective care to halt or transition to telehealth. This study provides a timely description of how COVID-19 affected employment, telehealth usage, and interprofessional collaboration. The STROBE checklist was used. We developed a cross-sectional online survey design that is rooted and grounded in the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). The TAM model allows us to identify characteristics that affect the use of telehealth technologies. The survey was deployed in November 2021 to local healthcare providers in Saudi Arabia. There were 66 individuals in the final sample. Both interprofessional satisfaction on frequency and quality were positively correlated with the frequency of interactions. The odds for satisfaction of frequency and quality were about 12 times (OR = 12.27) and 8 times 110 (OR = 8.24) more, respectively, for the participants with more than three times of interaction than the participants with no interaction at all. We also found that change in telehealth usage during the pandemic was positively associated with the Telehealth Usability Questionnaire (TUQ) scores. The estimated score for the participants who reported an increase in telehealth usage was 5.37, while the scores were lower for the participants reporting ‘no change’ and ‘decreased usage’. Additional training on telehealth use and integration to improve interprofessionalism is needed.

Stress and Coping Strategies among Nursing Students in Clinical Practice during COVID-19

Stress is common among nursing students and it has been exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study examined nursing students' stress levels and their coping strategies in clinical practice before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. A repeated-measures study design was used to examine the relationship between nursing students' stress levels and coping strategies before and during the pandemic. Confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to validate the survey and a student T-test was used to compare the level of stress and coping strategies among 131 nursing students. The STROBE checklist was used. During COVID-19, there was a reliable and accurate relationship between stress and coping strategies. Furthermore, both stress and coping strategy scores were lower before COVID-19 and higher during COVID-19. Nursing students are struggling to achieve a healthy stress-coping strategy during the pandemic. There is a need for the introduction of stress management programs to help foster healthy coping skills. Students are important resources for our health system and society and will continue to be vital long term. It is now up to both nursing educators and health administrators to identify and implement the needed improvements in training and safety measures because they are essential for the health of the patient as well as future pandemics.