Prevalence and factors associated with post-traumatic stress disorder in healthcare workers exposed to COVID-19 in Wuhan, China: a cross-sectional survey

BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic has posed significant threats to both the physical and psychological health of healthcare workers working in the front-line combating COVID-19. However, studies regarding the medium to long term impact of COVID-19 on mental health among healthcare workers are limited. Therefore, we conducted this cross-sectional survey to investigate the prevalence, factors and impact of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in healthcare workers exposed to COVID-19 8 months after the end of the outbreak in Wuhan, China.MethodsA web-based questionnaire was delivered as a link via the communication application WeChat to those healthcare workers who worked at several COVID-19 units during the outbreak (from December 2019 to April 2020) in Wuhan, China. The questionnaire included questions on social-demographic data, the post-traumatic stress disorder checklist-5 (PCL-5), the family care index questionnaire (Adaptation, Partnership, Growth, Affection and Resolve, APGAR), and the quality-of-life scale (QOL). The prevalence, risk and protective factors, and impact of PTSD on healthcare workers were subsequently analyzed.ResultsAmong the 659 participants, 90 healthcare workers were still suffering from PTSD 8 months after the end of the outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, in which avoidance and negative impact were the most affected dimensions. Suffering from chronic disease, experiencing social isolation, and job dissatisfaction came up as independent risk factors for PTSD, while obtaining COVID-19 related information at an appropriate frequency, good family function, and working in well-prepared mobile cabin hospitals served as protective factors. The impact of PTSD on COVID-19 exposed healthcare workers was apparent by shortened sleeping time, feeling of loneliness, poorer quality of life and intention to resign.ConclusionsEight months after the end of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, the level of PTSD in healthcare workers exposed to COVID-19 was still high. Apart from the commonly recognized risk factors, comorbid chronic disease was identified as a new independent risk factor for developing PTSD. For countries where the pandemic is still ongoing or in case of future outbreaks of new communicable diseases, this study may contribute to preventing cases of PTSD in healthcare workers exposed to infectious diseases under such circumstances

Flexible Method for Generating Arbitrary Vector Beams Based on Modified Off-Axis Interference-Type Hologram Encoding

A novel experimental setup for the generation of arbitrary vector beams is proposed. The system major includes two reflective liquid crystal spatial light modulators (RLC-SLM) and a polarizing beam splitting prism. Moreover, this method is not limited by the wavelength of light wave and the pixel size of SLM. Theoretical analysis shows that when Gaussian beam or a plane beam is illuminated on a computer-generated hologram (CGH) specially designed in this work, the complex amplitudes of the vector field’s two orthogonal polarization components may be changed by modifying the encoding parameters, resulting in a vector beam with arbitrary complex amplitude and polarization in the output field. The experimental results also show that the two independent coding channels of the device have good polarization-selective imaging ability, which greatly improves the flexibility of generating arbitrary vector beams