Exploring the anxiety levels of frontliners working in the emergency rooms in North Lebanon hospitals during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic

Abstract

This study is a non-experimental, correlational, descriptive and quantitative cross-sectional study that explored the prevalence of potentially concerning and dysfunctional anxiety levels amongst health-care workers in the Emergency room units (ER) at North Lebanon during the covid-19 pandemic. Moreover, this study also explored the relationship of predictor variables such as gender, health-care profession, marital status, availability of a covid-19 unit in the hospital, hospital department type and concerns for old family members getting infected with covid-19 with the anxiety level for front liners working in north Lebanon hospitals. Five hospitals (New Mazloum hospital, Islamic Charitable Hospital, Family Medical Center, Al Monla Hospital and Tripoli Governmental Hospital) from Tripoli and Zgharta participated in this study. Within these hospitals, 168 health-care workers; n=46 worked in the ER unit, n=19 worked in covid-19 care unit, and the others worked in other departments in the hospital. The instruments used to evaluate the levels of anxiety experienced by the participants were the Corona Anxiety Scale (CAS) and the Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI). The questionnaires circulated among the mentioned above hospitals from July 17, 2020 – September 17, 2020. The findings of this study suggests that there is no significant prevalence of anxiety levels amongst the health-care workers in any of the departments in North Lebanon hospital during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. However, the health-care workers working in the emergency rooms had higher levels of anxiety than the health-care workers working in the rest of the departments. Other findings indicated that females in the emergency rooms were more vulnerable to have potentially concerning anxiety than males in the emergency room. Future studies can focus on developing a screening tool that helps in identifying health-care workers who have high anxiety levels