Historical development of the Psychological Impact of the Pandemic on Health workers

Historical development of the Psychological Impact of the Pandemic on Health workers

Covid-19 was not the only virus that pushed healthcare workers on the verge of collapse regarding psychological implications. In history, such cases have been identified with various health issues too. According to Son et al. (2019), health workers underwent a psychological breakdown when the Middle East respiratory disease emerged in South Korea. From a total of 280 healthcare workers, almost half of the population expressed reduced resilience which sent fear into the perception and hope of other workers. Those who faced the Middle East Respiratory disease in 2015 lacked preparation to handle the outbreak, which caused most of them to develop psychological breakdowns with an immediate impact of perceived low resilience risk among the workers (Son, 2019).

Similarly, the same case was vivid when a terrifying Ebola virus was on outbreak. Chew et al. (2020) detail that emerging health issues always find healthcare workers unprepared, leaving them psychologically drained. Various psychological impacts are displayed, such as anxiety about the new disease, the guilt of watching the patient dying at your watch, depression, post-traumatic stress, anger, stigmatization as a healthcare worker and the grief of those being lost every day (Chew et al., 2020). The impact was not only limited to psychological torture, but the outbreak claimed the lives of healthcare workers at some point, terrorizing their being.

In other instances, an outbreak came as a psychological blow to healthcare workers worldwide. The other instance is the influenza pandemic that grieved many families in 2009 (Chew, 2020). Keysely et al. (2020) assert that healthcare workers are always on the verge of quitting when dealing with a novel outbreak. Influenza outbreaks took a toll on their work’s psychological well-being, leaving them both physically and mentally imbalanced. Sometimes these workers have their relatives under the watch of influenza patient procedures and are put into more extended quarantine periods. With the bit of experience of the new virus, they are thrown into despair, watching their loved ones into quarantine, not sure if they will get through the test of the allocated time and recover (Keysely et al., 2020). Moreover, healthcare workers undergo stigmatization based on insufficient knowledge and limited options for dealing with the situation.

The situation was never different when the novel Coronavirus took its popularity on the stage, pushing the world into chaos, fear, and hopelessness. Based on healthcare workers’ historical and psychological disposition, there was an urgent thirst to synthesize and integrate the experience accumulated while dealing with life-threatening outbreaks that emerged before Covid-19 (Chew, 2020). The virus was initially discovered in 2019 in a series of outbreaks of respiratory diseases situations in China, Wuhan City. The emergence of Covid-19 became a threat to life on the planet, with the death toll reaching the highest number in the history of infections and virus outbreaks. Healthcare workers have been subjected to an overwhelming workload accompanied by unrequited pressure since the emergence of the Virus (Yu Si et al., 2020).