Trastorno de estrés postraumático y presentismo en enfermeros durante la pandemia por covid-19. Post-traumatic stress disorder and presenteeism in nurses during covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

Introduction. The COVID-19 pandemic caused the death of millions of people around the world with high morbidity figures and the fear of contagion, which spread rapidly. The confinement measures added to the perception of uncertainty and a sense of danger had serious harmful psychological effects. Nurses were exposed to the virus with the conditioning factor frustration for being unable to carry out their work satisfactorily due to the consequent appearance of emotional fatigue (Legido-Quigley et al., 2020); thus, they adopted clinics for sadness, depressive symptoms and post-traumatic stress disorder (Brooks et al., 2020). Post-traumatic stress was more evident in health workers than in the rest of the population, which was a significant public health problem (Jansson et al., 2019; Jiang et al., 2021; Yuan et al., 2021). In Spain, a high prevalence of presenteeism in nurses was evident, where relationship with distress was corroborated; presenteeism is a phenomenon which has a negative impact on the employees, the company and the quality of patient care. This is also considered a predictor of future pathologies and possible absenteeism of the rest of the workers who also fall ill due to an increase in their workload (Sánchez-Zaballos et al., 2018). Aim. To determine the post-traumatic stress disorder in nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic and its relation to presenteeism. Material and methods. A descriptive, quantitative, cross-sectional and correlational study was carried out. Nurses with professional activity in the Principality of Asturias were sampled. With the permission of the Research Ethics Committee, a form, using Google Forms® was created. Sociodemographic, labor and COVID-19-related variables were also collected. Post-traumatic stress was measured with the Escala de Impacto del Estresor revisada (EIE-R) (Báguena et al., 2001) and presenteeism with the Spanish version of Stanford Presenteeism Scale-6 (S-SPS-6) (Baldonedo Mosteiro et al., 2019). Results. The average profile were 38.4-year-old married women where 40 % had children. Nurses with professional experience of 18.48 years on average and occasional work on a rotating shift were in first line. There were few in their family who depended on their salary. Almost all of them were vaccinated and few had been infected or had lived with a person who had had COVID-19. More than half stated that they were too exposed in their service and 40 % felt fear. Regarding post-traumatic stress disorder, binary EIE-R 66.59 % said Yes and 33.41 % said No. More than half had severe post-traumatic stress level. The prevalence of presenteeism was less than half of the sample. Conclusions. The strong association between post-traumatic stress and presenteeism in nurses is evident. Those who suffered from stress present less presenteeism. 66.59 % met the symptom criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder and the prevalence of presenteeism in our series was 38.94 %. A greater predisposition to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder was being a single woman with feelings of fear. While age was negatively associated, older women had a lower risk of post-traumatic stress disorder. The profile of a young nurses who perceive their work as stressful was significantly associated with an increased probability of having presenteeism, whereas the years of professional experience in the service acted as a protective factor (the more experience, the less presenteeism). Likewise, this "Type of contract" was one of the variables which seemed to appear more linked when deciding whether or not the nurse goes to work even when sick. Keywords: IES-R; Presenteeism; SPS-6; nursing; pandemic; COVID-19.