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A Descriptive Survey Investigating the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Public’s Perception of Healthcare Professionals

The COVID-19 pandemic brought immense attention to the healthcare system and its workers. While much research has been completed about the effects of COVID-19 on the healthcare system, little exists about how the opinions of patients have been altered by this pandemic. We decided to further investig...

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Autores principales: Stolzenberg, Laurence, Huang, Austin, Usman, Mohammad, MacGregor, Gordon
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Cureus 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10415964/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37575848
http://dx.doi.org/10.7759/cureus.41703
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author Stolzenberg, Laurence
Huang, Austin
Usman, Mohammad
MacGregor, Gordon
author_facet Stolzenberg, Laurence
Huang, Austin
Usman, Mohammad
MacGregor, Gordon
author_sort Stolzenberg, Laurence
collection PubMed
description The COVID-19 pandemic brought immense attention to the healthcare system and its workers. While much research has been completed about the effects of COVID-19 on the healthcare system, little exists about how the opinions of patients have been altered by this pandemic. We decided to further investigate how the public opinion of healthcare workers (HCWs) has changed to better understand how best we can serve society. The key takeaway from the data was that both the levels of perceived trustworthiness and respectability of healthcare workers decreased following the pandemic. Data showed that the level of perceived respectability decreased from an average of 7.84 to 7.30 and the level of perceived trustworthiness from 7.38 to 6.54, all of these values out of 10. While these changes were not enormous, they demonstrate a striking trend and were found to be significant through a paired t-test. Finally, respondents were also queried about their level of desire in pursuing healthcare as a career field and overwhelmingly there was little interest, with an average level of 1.24 out of 10. We believe our data and results show important trends that all HCWs should be aware of; notably decreasing interest in the field, reduced trust, and decrease in respect, all of which will require further study and analysis. We must consider the current environment in which small mistakes or mistrust can have grave consequences on public health and patient compliance. In addition, the lack of interest in joining the medical community is concerning considering the large efflux of workers leaving the profession. Future studies could focus on how to increase trust in HCWs or attract more people to the healthcare field.
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spelling pubmed-104159642023-08-12 A Descriptive Survey Investigating the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Public’s Perception of Healthcare Professionals Stolzenberg, Laurence Huang, Austin Usman, Mohammad MacGregor, Gordon Cureus Infectious Disease The COVID-19 pandemic brought immense attention to the healthcare system and its workers. While much research has been completed about the effects of COVID-19 on the healthcare system, little exists about how the opinions of patients have been altered by this pandemic. We decided to further investigate how the public opinion of healthcare workers (HCWs) has changed to better understand how best we can serve society. The key takeaway from the data was that both the levels of perceived trustworthiness and respectability of healthcare workers decreased following the pandemic. Data showed that the level of perceived respectability decreased from an average of 7.84 to 7.30 and the level of perceived trustworthiness from 7.38 to 6.54, all of these values out of 10. While these changes were not enormous, they demonstrate a striking trend and were found to be significant through a paired t-test. Finally, respondents were also queried about their level of desire in pursuing healthcare as a career field and overwhelmingly there was little interest, with an average level of 1.24 out of 10. We believe our data and results show important trends that all HCWs should be aware of; notably decreasing interest in the field, reduced trust, and decrease in respect, all of which will require further study and analysis. We must consider the current environment in which small mistakes or mistrust can have grave consequences on public health and patient compliance. In addition, the lack of interest in joining the medical community is concerning considering the large efflux of workers leaving the profession. Future studies could focus on how to increase trust in HCWs or attract more people to the healthcare field. Cureus 2023-07-11 /pmc/articles/PMC10415964/ /pubmed/37575848 http://dx.doi.org/10.7759/cureus.41703 Text en Copyright © 2023, Stolzenberg et al. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Infectious Disease
Stolzenberg, Laurence
Huang, Austin
Usman, Mohammad
MacGregor, Gordon
A Descriptive Survey Investigating the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Public’s Perception of Healthcare Professionals
title A Descriptive Survey Investigating the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Public’s Perception of Healthcare Professionals
title_full A Descriptive Survey Investigating the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Public’s Perception of Healthcare Professionals
title_fullStr A Descriptive Survey Investigating the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Public’s Perception of Healthcare Professionals
title_full_unstemmed A Descriptive Survey Investigating the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Public’s Perception of Healthcare Professionals
title_short A Descriptive Survey Investigating the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Public’s Perception of Healthcare Professionals
title_sort descriptive survey investigating the impact of the covid-19 pandemic on the public’s perception of healthcare professionals
topic Infectious Disease
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10415964/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37575848
http://dx.doi.org/10.7759/cureus.41703
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