Individual Stress Burden and Mental Health in Health Care Workers during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Moderating and Mediating Effects of Resilience

Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2022 May 27;19(11):6545. doi: 10.3390/ijerph19116545.

Abstract

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic generated a significant burden on the German health care system, affecting the mental health of health care workers (HCW) in particular. Resilience may serve as an essential protective factor for individuals' well-being. Objective: Our objective was to identify demographic and work-related correlates of individual resilience and to investigate the association between pandemic-related stress, resilience and mental health using different resilience models. Methods: Our sample comprised 1034 German HCW in different medical professions who completed an online survey from 20 April to 1 July 2020. Resilience was assessed using the Resilience Scale-5 (RS-5). The pandemic-related self-reported stress burden was captured by a single item, while depression and anxiety symptoms were measured with the PHQ-2 and GAD-2, respectively. Additionally, various sociodemographic and work-related factors were assessed. Results: Overall, we found high levels of resilience in the sample compared to a German sample before the pandemic, which were significantly associated only with the older age of participants and having children in both univariate and multivariate analyses. Regarding mechanisms of resilience, moderation analysis revealed that low individual resilience and high pandemic-related stress burden independently contributed to both anxiety and depression symptoms while resilience additionally moderated the relationship between stress burden and anxiety symptoms. The link between self-reported stress burden and mental health symptoms was also partially mediated by individual resilience. Conclusion: Taken together, the findings based on the present sample during the COVID-19 pandemic suggest that resilience plays a central role in the mental health of healthcare workers and that resilience-building interventions should be expanded, especially with a focus on younger employees.

Keywords: COVID-19; demographics; health care; mental health; resilience; stress.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Anxiety / diagnosis
  • Anxiety / epidemiology
  • COVID-19* / epidemiology
  • Child
  • Depression / diagnosis
  • Depression / epidemiology
  • Health Personnel / psychology
  • Humans
  • Mental Health
  • Pandemics
  • Resilience, Psychological*
  • SARS-CoV-2

Grants and funding

The study was designed and set up within the research group “Resilience in Religion and Spirituality”, speaker Prof. Dr. Cornelia Richter, financially supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)—project number 348851031. Data management and evaluation were performed in the collaborative research project egePan Unimed, which is financially supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) as part of the Network University Medicine (NUM) (funding code: 01KX2021) and led by Prof. Dr. Michael Albrecht, Prof. Dr. Jurgen Graf, Prof. Dr. Jochen Schmitt and Dr. Michael von Wagner. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The corresponding author had full access to all the data in the study and had final responsibility for the decision to submit for publication.