Stress and burnout of public health personnel in pandemic of the coronavirus infection 2019

Abstract

     The situation of the coronavirus infection 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic affects the global health of the population around the world, including healthcare personnel. The health workers are directly involved in the heavy workload and the ongoing global epidemic situation. As a result, these groups are at risk of stress and burnout. The primary objective aims to study the stress and power-out of work among public health personnel under the Office of Disease Prevention and Control 12, Songkhla Province, during the Coronavirus Disease 2019 epidemic. Therefore, the secondary objective is to identify the factors related to stress and work-related burnout among healthcare workers. This research is a cross-sectional study design. The study population are personnel of the Office of Disease Prevention and Control 12, Department of Disease Control, Ministry of Public Health, who gave consent to participate in research by answering questionnaires to assess stress and burnout conditions during the outbreak of Coronavirus 2019 in Thailand.
      The study results found that 158 health workers, 18.4 percent had high-stress levels, and 10.2 percent had occasional burnouts, and 2.5 percent had regular burnouts. From the correlation analysis of each factor, we found that stress factors and burnout related to each other with a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.698 (p-value < 0.001). In addition, when we analyzed with structural equation model method for specifying the relationship between stress and burnout. In detail, the occupational stress was a potential cause of burnout (X2/df = 0.843, CFI = 1.000, TFI =1.003, RMSEA=0.010, SRMSR =0.001). In summary, the pandemic of the COVID-19 leads to stress and blackouts among public health workers. This early detects stress and exhaustion symptoms from workers and immediately corrects them that prevent the development of the latent conditions into depression.