Effect of Covid-19 on Sleep Quality, Anxiety Level and Mental Well Being of Medical and Paramedical Staff

Authors: Ridhi Kumar , Dr. Priyanka Tiwari

Pages: 28-33

Abstract:

As almost everyone in the world is aware, an outbreak of COVID-19 was detected in China sometime in December 2019. Tilltoday, every continent in the planet has been highly affected by this contagious disease, with almost a million cases diagnosed inover 200 countries worldwide. This research focuses on these healthcare professionals and tries to study the impact of thesituation on their sleep quality, anxiety levels and mental well-being. As explained above, sleep is essential to ensure properfunctioning during the day. But due to the constant rise in the number of infected people, the anxiety level may increase anddisrupt the sleep quality resulting in poor mental well-being and due to this, they might not be able to work up to their fullpotential. Hence, with the help of this study, the main focus is to understand the impact of this pandemic situation on the mentalhealth of the healthcare professionals to be able to help them improve, if required. Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI), Beck’sAnxiety Inventory (BAI) and Warwick Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale (WEMWES) were the used scales to assess thevariables. A total sample of 81 healthcare professionals was considered. The results showed that the sleep quality, anxiety leveland mental well-being were 9.439, 5.654 and 50.918 respectively, which suggests that the sleep quality of these professionalswas poor and they exhibited low anxiety levels along with moderate mental well-being. It was concluded that the healthcareprofessionals require their mental health to be catered and maintained. This means that the government should initiate aprotocol to ensure that every healthcare professional has a mental health professional, whose help they can seek.