Psychological demands of health professionals in the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic

Recent literature emphasizes how the specific stressors of the COVID-19 outbreak affect the general population and frontline professionals, including those conducting support or backup activities in health units, which can lead to vicarious traumatization. Vicarious traumatization has been used to describe negative emotional reactions in mental health professionals who assist or treat victims of traumatic events. Thus, the aim of this article is to report the actions used in the face of the psychological demands of professionals in a hospital, who were not on the frontline of COVID-19. We collected their sociodemographic information and checked the psychological impact using the depression, anxiety, and stress scale (DASS-21), which was followed by a psychoeducational program (topics related to COVID-19 control and prevention), and individual psychological care for the most severe cases. A total of 118 professionals participated in this study; they were between 20 and 67 years old. Mild to moderate anxiety was observed in 36.5% of the medical teams, 83.3% of the administrative staff, and 65.7% of general service workers, while stress symptoms were observed in 80.2%, 83.3%, and 59.9%, respectively. Depressive symptoms (35.3%) were more frequent in general service workers. The medical teams reported the benefits of primary psychological care, while the other professionals demanded more institutional support services related to the prevention and use of personal protective equipment. This study highlights relevant psychological demands that have repercussions on the daily lives of professionals. The psychoeducational program was considered positive regarding clarification actions. However, it was not perceived as effective in reducing fear, which may result from vicarious traumatization and requires other intervention modalities.

A multilevel analysis of the role personality play between work organization conditions and psychological distress

Background Psychological distress in the workplace is usually attributed to work-related variables as well as non-work-related variables. Individuals working in the same organization can differ in terms of their appraisal of work-related stressors and coping strategies used to face them. The present study aims to evaluate the moderating role personality plays between work organizations conditions and psychological distress in a large sample of Canadian participants working in various occupations and workplaces. Methods Multilevel regression analyses were conducted on a sample that followed a hierarchical structure with workers (N1 = 1958) nested in workplaces (N2 = 63). The direct contribution of workplace and personality was tested in a variance component model as a first step. Following this initial step, we introduced interaction variables by blocks of 11. Those interaction variables refer to each interaction combined with a specific personality variable. Results Psychological demands, number of hours worked, job insecurity, neuroticism, and agreeableness were associated with higher levels of psychological distress. Inversely, decision authority, job recognition, self-esteem, locus of control were associated with lower levels of psychological distress. Lastly, agreeableness played a moderating role between low social support garnered from one’s supervisor and psychological distress. Conclusions To intervene on work-related variables, organizations could reduce psychological demands, minimize the number of hours worked through job redesign, allow teleworking and encourage work schedule flexibility. To reduce job insecurity, organizations could explicitly communicate future organizational plans. In the same vein, decision authority could be targeted by reducing hierarchical steps and increasing autonomy. Lastly, the results pertaining to agreeableness stand in contrast with those of previous studies. We assumed that workers scoring high on agreeableness tend to put themselves last and please others first. These tendencies could make them more susceptible to health issues. With that said, work environments still need workers who are agreeable and nice to be around. To prevent high levels of agreeableness leading to psychological distress, training and information workshops are recommended. Those include stress management interventions and workshops pertaining to time management and relaxation techniques.

A Gendered Analysis of Work, Stress and Mental Health, Among Professional and Non-Professional Workers

This study examines the differences in mental health experiences of workers in professional and non-professional roles, with a particular focus on the influence of gender. We examine: i) the perceived mental health of a subset of professional workers including accounting, academia, dentistry, medicine, nursing, and teaching, chosen because they represent different gender composition and sectors; and ii) work stress and work absences. Statistical analyses were applied to data from the Canadian Community Health Survey and a related Mental Health and Well-Being survey. Those in the selected professions reported better mental health, higher job satisfaction, and a lower prevalence of mental disorders, but higher self-perceived life and work stress compared to workers in non-professional roles. Workers in these professions reported higher job security and higher job control, but also higher psychological demands. Women in these professions showed significantly higher physical exertion and lower job authority and higher rates of work absences.

Teleworking While Sick: A Three-Wave Study of Psychosocial Safety Climate, Psychological Demands, and Presenteeism

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a significant increase in the proportion of employees for whom teleworking became mandatory. Presenteeism, or the behavior of working while ill, has hardly been studied in the context of telework. The pandemic forced millions of workers to abruptly transition to working from home for a prolonged period of time, leaving employers often unaware of their health status or work capacity of the workers. This change also eroded the work experience itself, the workplace, and their protective impact on both individual health and work outcomes. This study focused on the longitudinal relationships among psychosocial safety climate (PSC), a lead indicator of workplace conditions, psychological demands, an indicator of quality of work, and presenteeism among a representative sample of teleworkers. PSC was expected to have an indirect impact on presenteeism with psychological demands as a mediator of this impact.Method: We collected the data from a representative sample of teleworkers in the first months (T1: April, T2: June, and T3: December 2020) of the pandemic using a three-wave online survey (n = 275). We tested a model of PSC as a determinant of presenteeism in teleworkers with psychological demands as a mediator. A cross-lagged panel model was estimated to test cross-sectional and longitudinal relationships.Findings: As expected, psychological demands increased over time. Contrary to expectations, the prevalence of presenteeism remained unchanged while PSC increased over time. The data fully supported the mediating effect of psychological demands such that a higher evaluation of PSC at T1 led to lower psychological demands at T2, which led to reduced presenteeism at T3. We also found a reciprocal relationship, with higher psychological demands at T2 leading to decreased evaluation of PSC at T3. These results show that the perception of teleworkers on their organization as giving a high priority to their psychological health is an important determinant of their work experience, ultimately influencing their decision to work while ill. The context of the pandemic has highlighted the importance of a positive workplace climate and working conditions for reducing the behaviors that can be harmful to health and productivity. Implications for theory and practice, beyond the pandemic, are discussed.

The Demand–Control Model as a Predictor of Depressive Symptoms—Interaction and Differential Subscale Effects: Prospective Analyses of 2212 German Employees

Testing assumptions of the widely used demand–control (DC) model in occupational psychosocial epidemiology, we investigated (a) interaction, i.e., whether the combined effect of low job control and high psychological demands on depressive symptoms was stronger than the sum of their single effects (i.e., superadditivity) and (b) whether subscales of psychological demands and job control had similar associations with depressive symptoms. Logistic longitudinal regression analyses of the 5-year cohort of the German Study of Mental Health at Work (S-MGA) 2011/12–2017 of 2212 employees were conducted. The observed combined effect of low job control and high psychological demands on depressive symptoms did not indicate interaction (RERI = −0.26, 95% CI = −0.91; 0.40). When dichotomizing subscales at the median, differential effects of subscales were not found. When dividing subscales into categories based on value ranges, differential effects for job control subscales (namely, decision authority and skill discretion) were found (p = 0.04). This study does not support all assumptions of the DC model: (1) it corroborates previous studies not finding an interaction of psychological demands and job control; and (2) signs of differential subscale effects were found regarding job control. Too few prospective studies have been carried out regarding differential subscale effects.

The Role of Personal Biological Resource in the Job Demands-Control-Support Model: Evidence From Stress Reactivity

Job resources can buffer the deleterious effect of adverse work environments. Extant studies on the interaction pattern between job resources and adverse environments were confined to the diathesis stress model. This traditional perspective has received the challenge from the differential susceptibility model and the vantage sensitivity model. Additionally, stress reactivity may be one of the important job resources at the personal biological level, but its moderating role was short of empirical research. This study aimed to examine how stress reactivity interacts with work environments in predicting job burnouts among 341 Chinese hospital female nurses. This study selected job control and job support representative of supportive environments and psychological demands representative of an adverse environment and the cortisol content in 1-cm hair segment as a biomarker to assess individual’s stress reactivity in 1 month. The nurses self-reported their work environments and job burnouts and provided 1-cm hair segments closest to the scalp. Hair cortisol content was measured with high-performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry. The interaction pattern was examined with multiple linear regressions and the analysis of region of significance (RoS). The regression revealed that the interaction of hair cortisol content with job control could positively predict professional efficiency among nurses, with psychological demands could negatively predict emotional exhaustion, and with coworker support could negatively predict professional efficiency. The RoS analysis revealed that nurses with high cortisol levels had not only significantly higher professional efficiency than those with low cortisol levels in high job control but also significantly lower professional efficiency in low job control. Nurses with high cortisol levels had significantly higher emotional exhaustion than those with low cortisol levels in low psychological demands. Nurses with low cortisol levels had not only significantly higher professional efficiency than those with high cortisol levels in high coworker support but also significantly lower professional efficiency in low coworker support. The interaction patterns of stress reactivity with both job control and coworker support were consistent with the differential susceptibility model, but the interaction between stress reactivity and psychological demands supported the vantage sensitivity model.

EXPRESS: Academic labour as professional service work? A psychosocial analysis of emotion in lecturer-student relations under marketization

The marketization of higher education entails a radical reshaping of the educational relationship as one in which the lecturer is recast as a professional service worker, implicitly or explicitly tasked with ensuring the satisfaction of fee-paying students as sovereign consumers. What does an organizational discourse of high customer satisfaction mean for the emotional experiences of lecturers on the frontline? In this article, we conduct a psychosocial analysis of academics’ experiences of interacting with students in a marketized higher education context. We illustrate how institutional imperatives readily align with lecturers’ internalised professional duty of care for students who are discursively constructed as highly anxious and vulnerable. At the same time, changing power differentials wrought by marketization heighten the likelihood of emotional responses in the relationship that are intense, spontaneous, and sometimes involuntary – and thus appear replete with unconscious meanings. Informed by Freudian psychoanalysis, we illustrate how academics enact various defence mechanisms in response to unconscious feelings of dependence, subordination, vulnerability and resentment of the student as an authority figure. We conclude that organisational imperatives to ‘corporately care’ for students have the unintended consequence of generating acute ambivalence that drastically intensifies the psychological demands on teaching staff.

El “desierto digital”: repercusiones de la COVID-19 en la Educación en España y Brasil

Con la aparición de la COVID-19, la forma de hacer y pensar la educación mediatizada por las tecnologías digitales, surgió con una fuerza repentina y nunca experimentada de la forma en que la vimos ocurrir en el año 2020. Así, la nueva realidad educativa se evidencia en la distancia de los cuerpos y la distancia en los procesos de enseñanza y aprendizaje, que ha tenido numerosos impactos en la práctica diaria de la educación. Esta investigación busca conocer las percepciones de los profesores/as de educación básica en España y Brasil, sobre las repercusiones de la COVID-19 en la educación. Se trata de una investigación descriptiva-exploratoria, con enfoque cualitativo, que realizó 12 entrevistas semiestructuradas a profesores/as de educación básica de ambos países. Los resultados indican que la incorporación abrupta de tecnologías digitales provocó un gran sufrimiento a los docentes, debido a la falta de formación para ellos, falta de condiciones mínimas de trabajo, aparición de nuevas demandas profesionales y psicológicas, así como diferencias generacionales en las relaciones con las tecnologías. With the emergence of Covid-19, the way of doing and thinking education permeated by digital technologies came up with sudden and never before seen strenght as we experienced in the year of 2020. With it, the new educational reality is highlighted in the distance between the bodies and the distance in teaching and learning processes, which has had numerous impacts in the daily practice of education. This investigation seeks to know the Basic Education professors and lecturers perceptions in Spain and Brasil, about the repercussions of Covid-19 in Education. It is a descriptive-exploratory investigation, with qualitative focus, that performed 12 semi-structured interviews to Basic Education teaching staff from both countries. The results indicate that the abrupt incorporation of digital technologies lead to a great suffering to teachers, on the account of a lack of training, lack of minimum working conditions, emergence of new professional and psychological demands, as well as generational differences in the relationships with the technologies.

Body Ignorance and Toughness Culture: Injury Issues among Elite Indonesian Athletes

Elite sport is a demanding career and injuries are common among elite athletes. However, empirical attempts to understand it in the Indonesian context through a sport psychology perspective has been rare. In this qualitative research about Indonesian elite athlete psychological demands, 37 elite athletes and 9 sport practitioners were interviewed through semi-structured interview and photographic elicitation interview (PEI) and data were analysed using a reflexive thematic analysis. The results showed that athletes realised that their elite athletic career is ephemeral and will come to retirement; during that short time, they moved along in a continuum of caring and exploiting their body. Two distinct sub-themes about injury built from the analysis were: (i) Exploiting the body versus caring the body, which reflects the dynamic stance of athletes in treating their body and its influential factors. (ii) The social environment around athletes that promotes ignorance versus support, which describes the cultural and social nuances of injury. Implications and invitations for future research through a multidisciplinary approach of health and sport sciences is also discussed. Keywords: injury, elite athlete, Indonesia

Experience of Application of the International Classification of Functioning (ICF) in Assessment of the Need for Rehabilitation of Patients with Operated Breast Cancer

The article presents the results of a study of the biopsychosocial principle in the rehabilitation of patients with breast cancer. Aim. to assess the need for patients with operable breast cancer in rehabilitation measures at various stages of treatment. Results. when assessing the need for rehabilitation of patients with operable breast cancer, it was found that the need for rehabilitation measures in all patients increases in the postoperative period and persists for 12 months after the end of treatment. Special attention should be paid to the indicators of physical and social functioning in subgroups of patients who received neoadjuvant chemotherapy: increased fatigue, weight gain, unstable emotional background impose significant restrictions on the socio-role functioning of patients, reducing the quality of life and increasing the risks associated with the progression of the underlying disease, exacerbation of chronic diseases. Thus, patients who participated in the program of rehabilitation measures in the framework of the biopsychosocial approach showed the best performance after the end of treatment during the observation period: in the subgroup of patients receiving chemotherapy and rehabilitation in the framework of the biopsychosocial model, the dynamics of the recovery needs of the operation sought to average indicators by domain “b4552 Fatigue” – 21%, “b4551 Aerobic capacity “ – 18%, “d240 Handling stress and other psychological demands » – 39%, “b710 Mobility of joint functions “ – 29%, self-service (“d510 Washing”; “ d540 Dressing») – 21%, “b455 Exercise tolerance functions “ – 22%. In the subgroup of patients who received on-demand rehabilitation, there was an increase in the need for rehabilitation by domain: “d240 Handling stress and other psychological demands “ – 45%, “b4552 Fatigue” – 28%, self-service (“d510 Washing”; “ d540 Dressing») – 32%, b455 Exercise tolerance functions – 30%. Conclusion: The results of the study suggest a positive effect of rehabilitation measures on the functioning of patients with operable breast cancer.