To the Editor,
Since December 2019, several cases of novel coronavirus pneumonia were reported in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China. The outbreak attracted global attention and rapidly developed into an ongoing pandemic.1
On January 7, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CCDC) isolated a novel pathogen from the larynx of a patient suffering from the novel disease. The World Health Organization named it as SARS-CoV-2.2
The public outbreak and the current pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 have resulted in an overflow of workload in medical centers around the globe. Hence, it is possible that health care professionals, who were already leading stressful lives, experience burnout syndrome as the direct result of overwhelming workload and suboptimum conditions.3
Burnout syndrome is defined as emotional exhaustion or energy depletion and a process of psychological reaction to long-term stress, which, in turn, may subsequently hinder performance and task accomplishment by the suffering individuals and health care systems and can be influenced by many individual and contextual factors.4
It may be a statistical relationship between burnout and depression, anxiety, stress, and fatigue, and effective interventions for treating symptoms that are essential by knowing the causes of a problem this can lead to find more targeted solutions.5
To provide better care and management in the combat against the COVID-19 pandemic, hemodialysis departments have also been entrusted with the task of screening and monitoring critically ill patients.6
Many restrictions, being labeled as a handicapped, many financial problems, and many other psychological tensions cause different psychiatric complications that disrupt hemodialysis patients' quality of life, which, in turn, increases workload tiredness for medical staff and negatively impacts their work quality.7
To prevent, or at least minimize, burnout among health care professionals, psychological intervention may prove to be useful. To this means, we suggest the following: the development of a psychoeducational program to better guide the medical staff to evaluate, manage, and overcome the psychological complications of burnout syndrome; a supervision program to solve their psychological problems; and arranging group activities with the aim of stress reduction.8
It appears that an effective, holistic, and person-directed intervention to reduce burnout should consider its causes and a variety of different therapeutic tools. The training of coping strategies or interpersonal/communication skills in a balanced manner between personal training and service responsibilities, the management of negative emotions, and the use of relaxation methods may be useful against the situations that may make medical staff more prone to the experience of burnout.9
Thus, we believe that maintaining staff morale and psychological health is as important in controlling the pandemic as social distancing and quarantine; health care centers cannot function without their professionals. Psychological and educational help will improve performance among health care professionals, enabling them to better respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and other similar situations that may present themselves in the future. Further research is recommended to specify the best methods of psychological health care for medical staff providing service in hemodialysis wards.
- Nader Aghakhani, PhD
Associate Professor
-Samereh Eghtedar, PhD
Assistant Professor
Patient Safety Research Center
Clinical Research Institute
Urmia University of Medical Sciences
Urmia, Iran
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