Long COVID and its associations with burnout, anxiety, and depression among U. S. healthcare workers in the United States, 2025, Vu et al.

[SNT Gatchaman]

Long COVID and its associations with burnout, anxiety, and depression among U. S. healthcare workers in the United States

Spoiler: Authors

Vu, Thanh-Huyen T. ; Hua, Miao Jenny ; Dubois, Cerina ; Moskowitz, Judith T. ; Wallia, Amisha ; Hirschhorn, Lisa R. ; Wilkins, John T. ; Evans, Charlesnika T.

BACKGROUND
Data on Long COVID and its associations with burnout, anxiety and depression among healthcare workers (HCW) in the United States (U. S.) is limited.

METHODS
This study utilized cross-sectional data from the final survey conducted in July 2023, which was part of a longitudinal cohort study assessing COVID-19-related burnout and wellbeing among healthcare workers (HCWs) in a large tertiary academic healthcare system in the Chicago area. The survey included questions on self-reported Long COVID status, as well as the Oldenburg Burnout Inventory (OLBI) to measure burnout and the Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS) computer adaptive tests (CAT) to assess anxiety and depression. A total of 1,979 HCWs participated in the survey, yielding a response rate of 56.1%.

RESULTS
The analysis included 1,678 respondents with complete data, of whom 1,171 (70%) self-reported having had COVID-19. Of these, 90 (7.7%) reported Long COVID, with 53% indicating that their most bothersome symptoms persisted for more than 6 months, while 50% reported no longer experiencing those symptoms at the time of the survey. Multivariable linear regression analyses revealed that Long COVID was significantly associated with higher OLBI scores (β = 2.20, p = 0.004), PROMIS anxiety scores (β = 2.64, p = 0.001) and PROMIS depression scores (β = 1.98, p = 0.011) compared to those who had COVID-19 but not Long COVID. Similar patterns of associations were observed when comparing the Long COVID group to those who never had COVID-19. No significant differences were found between those who never had COVID-19 and those who had COVID-19 without developing Long COVID.

CONCLUSION
Long COVID was associated with higher levels of burnout, depression, and anxiety among healthcare workers compared to those who had COVID-19 alone or were never infected, despite its lower prevalence during the endemic phase. These findings underscore the need for continued prevention efforts and targeted support strategies in healthcare settings.

Web | PDF | Frontiers in Public Health | Open Access

 

[Utsikt]

Long COVID was associated with higher levels of burnout, depression, and anxiety among healthcare workers

Using scales that are completely inappropriate for sick people.

These findings underscore the need for continued prevention efforts and targeted support strategies in healthcare settings.

Or maybe try to prevent HCWs from being infected? You know, the sane thing to do.

 

[rvallee]

Ask overlapping questions, get useless answers.

If anything, this supports the obvious fact that those questionnaires don't assess what they claim to assess, and rather are generic questions about overall ability to function and common symptoms that basically give a huge number of false positives while having zero validity in being specific to what they claim to assess.

None of the generic constructs they invented make any actual sense. This is all being exposed and the industry is completely incapable of dealing with this simple fact.

 

[Hutan]

Yes, totally agree about overlapping questions.

Oldenburg Burnout Inventory

The Oldenburg Burnout Inventory (OLBI) is a psychometric scale designed to measure burnout across adults employed in various occupational settings (Demerouti, 1999). The OLBI aims to provide a measure of burnout that includes both physical and cognitive aspects of exhaustion, as well as the concept of disengagement from work.

This is reflected in two subscales:

Exhaustion (8 items): Feelings of physical, affective and cognitive fatigue, including aspects of fatigue and the need for rest. Example: “After my work, I regularly feel worn out and weary”.​

Disengagement (8 items): The degree of distance from one’s work, encompassing negative attitudes and behaviours towards the work itself. Disengagement is an important factor when considering clients at risk of so-called “quiet quitting”. Example: “I frequently talk about my work in a negative way”.​

The average score is 43.
I wonder if the authors differentiate the exhaustion scores from the disengagement scores in this paper.

There are so many things that could be said about the application of this survey to people with Long Covid. If your life had become a massive struggle because of the aftermath of an infection you got at work because you weren't given decent protective equipment, would you perhaps be more inclined to say negative things about your employer than you used to?

'After my work, I usually feel worn out and weary'​

'There are days where I feel tired before I arrive at work'​

'After working, I have enough energy for my leisure activities',​

'After work, I tend to need more time than in the past in order to relax and feel better'​

That's a score of 16 just there for anyone with a ME/CFS-type illness.


And some of the questions just aren't really a good measure of anything.
'This is the only type of work that I can imagine myself doing'. The answer of the engaged employee is apparently 'Strongly agree'. But, for goodness sake, if a person can't imagine themselves doing something different, perhaps that's because they are downtrodden, desperate and lack qualifications. It's possible to imagine doing other work, but still choose and be deeply invested in what you are doing. I don't think answering 'strongly agree' to that question is necessarily a sign of an emotionally resilient person.

There's also the issue of some of the questions being relative to an assessment of how things were in the past. For example 'I feel more and more engaged in my work'. If someone started out feeling very engaged in their work, it would be very hard for them to feel more engaged, but they might still have a very high level of engagement.

'Over time, one can become disconnected from this type of work'. The person might have seen others become disconnected, while not feeling disconnected themselves.


Yeah, like so many of these scales, this one looks pretty shaky when you actually look at it. I'm not convinced it is any better than asking someone 'Do you feel burnt out by your work?', and, in the case of anyone with a physical reason to feel exhausted and be struggling to do their work, it's completely irrelevant.


I don't understand how people can produce and use these sorts of survey tools, and indeed, produce these sorts of papers. We can see the problems at the broad level immediately upon reading the abstract, and it only takes a few minutes more to find out the detail. The problems aren't difficult to see or understand. What on earth are supervisors, peer reviewers, editors, ethics committees doing to allow this sort of harmful nonsense?