Prepandemic Mental Health and Well-being: Differences Within the Health Care Workforce and the Need for Targeted Resources.

BACKGROUND: Occupational stress and diminished well-being among health care workers were concerning even before the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic exacerbated existing stressors and created new challenges for this workforce. Research on the mental health of health care workers has focused on physicians and nurses, with less attention to other occupations. METHODS: To assess pre-coronavirus disease mental health and well-being among workers in multiple health care occupations, we used 2017 to 2019 data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. RESULTS: Across the health care workforce, insufficient sleep (41.0%) and diagnosed depression (18.9%) were the most common conditions reported. Counselors had the highest prevalence of diagnosed depression. Health care support workers had elevated prevalences for most adverse health conditions. CONCLUSIONS: Ensuring a robust health care workforce necessitates identifying and implementing effective occupation-specific prevention, intervention, and mitigation strategies that address organizational and personal conditions adversely affecting mental health.

Occurrences of Workplace Violence Related to the COVID-19 Pandemic, United States, March 2020 to August 2021.

As businesses dealt with an increasingly anxious public during the COVID-19 pandemic and were frequently tasked with enforcing various COVID-19 prevention policies such as mask mandates, workplace violence and harassment (WPV) emerged as an increasing important issue affecting worker safety and health. Publicly available media reports were searched for WPV events related to the COVID-19 pandemic that occurred during 1 March 2020, and 31 August 2021, using Google News aggregator services scans with data abstraction and verification. The search found 408 unique WPV events related to COVID-19. Almost two-thirds involved mask disputes. Over half (57%) of the 408 events occurred in retail (38%) and food service (19%). We also conducted a comparison of events identified in this search to a similar study of media reports between March 2020 to October 2020 that used multiple search engines to identify WPV events. Despite similar conclusions, a one-to-one comparison of relevant data from these studies found only modest overlap in the incidents identified, suggesting the need to make improvements to future efforts to extract data from media reports. Prevention resources such as training and education for workers may help industries de-escalate or prevent similar WPV events in the future.