Psychological impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on non-frontline healthcare workers

The letter presents a study on the psychological impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on non-frontline healthcare workers. Here, authors assessed the psychological impact of the epidemic on Health-care workers (HCW) during the first lockdown period in France (from 17 March to 11 May 2020). Two hundred and twenty-five HCW fulfilled the questionnaires. Interestingly, authors found that impacted/non-frontline HCW had a higher score of depression and anxiety than both frontline HCW and non-impacted/non-frontline HCW. This suggests that the most important stress factor for HCW is the confrontation to rapid and unplanned work reorganization, which mainly concerns non-frontline/ impacted HCW who had to urgently replace their colleagues in different wards, or rapidly modify their activity depending on the pandemic situation and the situation in the frontline units, for example. This reorganization was stressful because of rapidly changing information, insufficient psychological support, and little training on personal protective equipment. Indeed, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, many governments and hospitals have formulated a series of actions to support HCW, including supplementary external material, human resources, and psychological support, but these exceptional measures have been mainly deployed for frontline HCW. Providing psychological support to HCW recently appeared as a significant public mental health challenge and the results presented in this study may have important practical implications. The COVID-19 pandemic emphasizes the high levels of anxiety and stress of HCW. Beyond medical and psychological support to HCW during this unprecedented crisis, it is also critical to develop new healthcare management models for the next generations of doctors, nurses, and staff of health-care services. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)