ABSTRACT
Throughout its nearly two hundred year existence, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) (https://www.nlm.nih.gov/) has advanced biomedicine and public health by acquiring, organizing, preserving, and disseminating knowledge essential to health and medicine. NLM has devised many innovations including standard terminologies and messaging formats such as the Journal Article Tag Suite (https://dtd.nlm.nih.gov/) to organize and manage biomedical literature. While scientific communication largely relied on books and journals over the last two hundred years, digital data are quickly forming the substrate of scientific communications. Data come in forms with much less structure than that afforded by publications, and these can vary from observations made during carefully controlled clinical trials to streams of genomic sequences to the counts of footfalls captured by personal devices. Coincidently, an increasingly diverse set of users - from clinicians to laypeople to public health to big pharma to scientists - bring unique perspectives as they draw meaning from new sets of scientific output. How does a modern library meet its mission to acquire, organize, preserve, and disseminate the many outputs of contemporary science? What role do standards play? How does NLM help this diverse set of stakeholders derive meaning from its resources? © 2022 - The authors. Published by IOS Press.
ABSTRACT
Background: Medical workers have been increasingly involved in emergent public health events, which can lead to severe stress. However, no standardized, officially recognized, unified tool exists for mental distress measurement in medical workers who experienced the public health events. Purpose: In the present study, we propose the Global Health Events-Mental Stress Scale (GHE-MSS), as a revised version of the Impact of Event Scale-Revision (IES-R), for assessment of medical workers' acute mental stress responses within one month and their chronic mental stress responses within six months after major health events. Patients and methods: The IES-R was slightly modified, developed, and its reliability and validity were tested using the Delphi survey, primary survey with 115 participants, formal survey with 300 participants, and clinical evaluation with 566 participants. Results: Exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis confirmed a promising validity of the scale. The values of Cronbach's alpha coefficient, the Spearman-Brown coefficient, and the retested Cronbach's alpha coefficient of the scale applied for the clinical evaluation were 0.88, 0.87, and 0.98, respectively, which confirmed a good internal consistency and stability. The results of the goodness-of-fit test indicated a good adaptation of the model. A correlation analysis was conducted to assess the correlation between the GHE-MSS and the PCL-C, which had a correlation coefficient of 0.68 (P < 0.01). Conclusion: GHE-MSS can be applied with a promising reliability and validity for the assessment of the acute mental stress response of medical workers experiencing public health events. This method can also be used for the screening of mental stress-associated disorders.