Available online 4 August 2023, 151721

Author links open overlay panel, , , AbstractBackground

During the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, as in past disasters and emergencies, nurses around the world play an important role. What is more, the unprecedented pressure exerted by the pandemic on healthcare systems in every country brings big challenges to nurses, which may affect their well-being, work efficacy and job satisfaction.

Objective

The main objective of the presented studies was to describe anxiety factors related to the work of nurses during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic; to assess the intensity of coronavirus anxiety and job satisfaction experienced by nurses at that time; to assess predictors of job satisfaction of nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic; to assess the differences in the intensity of job satisfaction and coronavirus anxiety depending on the selected variables related to their experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Design

Anonymous questionnaire surveys were conducted online among the participants between 23 June 2020 and 23 March 2022 in Poland.

Participants

433 nurses from 15 Polish provinces were included in the studies (age range 22–68; M = 41.63). Nursing seniority M = 18.6.

Methods

The studies were based on: Satisfaction with Job Scale (SSP), Coronavirus Anxiety Scale (CAS), and a self-report structured questionnaire.

Results

The most respondents indicated that they were afraid of becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2 (25.4 %), transmitting infection to the family (22.4 %), becoming sick with COVID-19 and experiencing health complications (6.7 %) and of excessive work responsibilities and physical fatigue (6.5 %). Based on the bivariate correlation, it can be concluded that job satisfaction of the respondents during the COVID-19 pandemic was on an average level (M = 19.9); coronavirus anxiety was on an average level (M = 4.9), and stress at work was on a high level (M = 7.1). Coronavirus anxiety did not constitute statistically significant predictors of job satisfaction of subjects studied during the pandemic (SE = 0,048; β = 0,05; p = 0.942).

Conclusions

Coronavirus anxiety wasn't associated with job satisfaction of nurses directly. Job satisfaction of nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic was likely to be shaped by a range of different factors.

Tweetable abstract

In Polish nurses coronavirus anxiety was average and wasn't associated with their job satisfaction.

Section snippetsBackground

During the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, as in past disasters and emergencies, nurses around the world play an important role. What is more, the unprecedented pressure exerted by the pandemic on healthcare systems in every country brings big challenges to nurses, which may affect their well-being, work efficacy and job satisfaction. What is important, in order to perform their daily duties at work, nurses risk their lives every day. According to the International Council of Nurses (ICN), about 90,000 or

Participants and procedures

Anonymous questionnaire surveys were conducted online among the participants (nurses) of Facebook groups for healthcare professionals. The membership in the selected Facebook groups for nurses was verified by the fact that in order to become a group member, the person had to complete a personal questionnaire introduced by the group moderator and to provide one's medical license number. The study was conducted from June 23, 2020 to March 23, 2022 via the Internet. The data was collected on the

Results

The study group characteristics are presented in Table 1. It comprised 433 subjects working as a nurse (age range 22–68) from 15 Polish provinces. The number of females and males reflected their percentage distribution in this professional group, since the job of a nurse is highly female dominated. Most of the respondents were female, married, had a master's degree in nursing, lived in large cities with over 400 thousand residents and had work experience of <11 years or over 25 years (Table 1).

Discussion

At the same time, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared “COVID-19” an official name of the new disease manifested with acute respiratory insufficiency caused by SARS-CoV-2 (World Health Organization, 2020).

The most common symptoms of COVID-19 are fever, cough and respiratory disorders. Other frequently occurring symptoms include fatigue, muscle pains, diarrhea, sore throat, loss of the sense of smell and taste, and abdominal pain. The time between exposure to SARS-CoV-2 and onset of

Limitations

While this study provides evidence important for nursing, a few limitations were identified. The use of self-reported online measures may have limited the responses of the participants. Future research should explore the role of social and organizational support in nurses' work and during quarantine. The survey was administered using the snowball sampling method and we used a self-administered questionnaire, so disadvantages associated with self-report data (e.g., introspective ability,

Conclusions•

In the light of the achieved study results, a vast majority of the nurses reported various anxiety factors while performing their work during the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic. The majority nurses indicated that they were afraid of becoming infected or infecting their family members, and also of becoming sick with COVID-19 and having complications or of excessive work responsibilities and physical fatigue as a result of contact with an undiagnosed infected patient.

•

The coronavirus anxiety of the study

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Agnieszka Kruczek: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Writing article, Editing.

Anna Andruszkiewicz: Data curation, Writing - Original draft preparation, Writing paper, Supervision.

Katarzyna Betke: Visualization, Investigation, Validiting, Writing - Reviewing and Editing, Writing Paper.

Katarzyna Adamczyk: Visualization, Investigation, Validiting, Writing - Reviewing and Editing, Writing Paper.

Funding sources

This research received no external funding.

Uncited references

Bourouiba, 2020

International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV), n.d

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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