ABSTRACT
The emergence of novel severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) in Wuhan, China during late 2019 spread quickly and creating international emergency and tremendous challenges for healthcare workers (HCWs) including dental and oral healthcare professionals. The brisk spread of this new viral disease forced HCWs to suffer from different types of stress including mortality and morbidity, delayed patient dealing, scarcity of complete personal protective equipment (PPE), and fear of being COVID-19 virus target and carriers to their family members. The dental and oral HCWs were also advised to apply mobility restrictions and social distancing measures. All of a sudden, most of the regular medical check-ups including dental clinic appointments were cancelled, reducing the number of patients flow. The abrupt cancellation of appointments put a sudden break on medical profession including dental practice. Different scales like progression of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Chinese Health Questionnaire-12 (CHd-12), Davidson Trauma Scale-Chinese (DTS-C), General Health Questionnaire (GHQ), Impact of Event Scale (IES), Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) etc. have been devised in different countries to assess the overall mental health status. The reports from earlier SARS outbreak in 2007 had also put a psychological impact on HCWs but least has been learned from this out break. The reports from previous Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) outbreaks and early COVID-19 pandemic have a considerable negative impact (short and long-term) on mental status of HCWs. Different types of negative impacts on mental health like depression, anxiety, sleep disorders and distress were reported in HCWs during COVID-19 pandemic. The current COVID-19 pandemic given a broader understanding of how much, how far and how fast an outbreak can occur and affect HCWs psychologically. In this review, authors summarize the impact of COVID-19 pandemic in the psychology of HCWs, as reported from different countries.Copyright © 2022, Anka Publishers. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
Dental practitioners are at risk due to direct contact with possibly infected patients as front-line health care professionals during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Therefore, it is of interest to measure the anxiety, fear, awareness and economic effect of the epidemic on Indian dentists at work .This study was conducted utilizing an online survey questionnaire and Google forms from August 22nd to August 23rd, 2021. A total of 485 doctors took part in the survey. The questionnaire included open-ended, closed-ended, and Likert five-point scale items to measure anxiety, awareness, and the financial impact of COVID-19 on dentists. The Mann-Whitney test was used for two groups. The Kruskal–Wallis test was used as a post-hoc test for multigroup comparisons. The average age of the participants was 36.5 ± 9.2 years, with the majority (75.21%) being just graduate dentists. More than 80.1% of interviewees expressed concern about contracting COVID-19. Younger dentists and females have higher levels of anxiety than older dentists. The level of awareness and practice of COVID-19 precautions and infection-control measures among these dentists (94.1%) was found to be high. This is due to age, qualification, and designation (except GP vs. Specialist). Data shows that about 75 percent of practitioners said their income had decreased by roughly 50 percent, independent of demographic characteristics. Data also shows that Indian dentists had a high degree of knowledge and awareness during the COVID-19 epidemic despite fear and anxiety. © 2022 International Journal of Health Sciences.All rights reserved.