The effect of COVID-19 pandemic on anxiety, burnout and sleeping problems in emergency nurses

This study is a descriptive study conducted to determine the anxiety and burnout levels and sleep quality of emergency nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Research data were obtained by interviewing nurses working in the emergency department of a city hospital affiliated to the Ministry of Health in Istanbul between November 2020 and January 2021. Since the beginning of the pandemic, 142 nurses working in the emergency unit volunteered to participate in the research. Data were obtained by using the "Personal Data Collection Form", "Pittsburg Sleep Quality Scale", "Maslach Burnout Scale" and "Health Anxiety Scale". In addition to descriptive statistics, Chi-Square Test, t test, Spearmann Test, ANOVA and regression analyzes were used to evaluate the research data. The internal consistency of the scales was calculated with the Cronbach-alpha coefficient. The mean age of the emergency nurses was 29.30±6.77 years, 61.4% of them were women and most of them (75.4%) had undergraduate nursing education. More than half of them (59.9%) had a weekly working time of 50 hours or more. As of the date of the study data, when the first 8 months of the pandemic were left behind, PCR positivity for Covid-19 was detected in 30.1% of the emergency nurses. The Maslach Burnout Scale "Emotional Exhaustion" sub-dimension score of nurses working in the emergency department is 22.02±7.30, "Depersonalization" sub-dimension score is 7.52±3.82, "Personal Achievement" sub-dimension score is 11.99±3.70. The Health Anxiety Scale score was 13.80±5.21, with 3.90±2.19 for the "Oversensitivity" sub-dimension and 17.70±6.32 for the "Anxiety" sub-dimension. The mean score they got from the Pittsburg Sleep Quality Scale was 8.47±3.04, and the sleep quality of 89.4% of the nurses was poor. A moderate positive correlation was found between the level of burnout and sleep quality. Anxiety score (p=0.006) was found to be effective with a coefficient of 1.171, sleep latency (p=0.024) with a coefficient of 2.541, and use of sleeping pills with a coefficient of 4.502 (p=0.045) on the Maslach Burnout Scale score. As a result; during the pandemic period, emergency nurses' sleep quality is poor, health anxiety levels are low, and burnout levels are mostly medium and high.