Stress and the Surgical Resident in the COVID-19 Pandemic

OBJECTIVE: The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically transformed the healthcare community and medical education across the United States. The aim of this study was to evaluate the impact of COVID-19 on the surgical resident training experience, assess possible sources of stress or anxiety among surgery residents, and examine how patterns of anxiety vary by resident rank. DESIGN: We developed and disseminated a survey, which included the Generalized Anxiety Disorder 7-Item Scale (GAD-7), to all general and integrated plastic surgery residents in their clinical years of training at the University of California, San Francisco. Statistical analysis of the survey responses was performed using the Kruskal-Wallis or Wilcoxon rank sum test. Post-hoc analysis was performed using the Bonferroni-corrected Dunn test. Survey data were combined with aggregated duty hour information and operative case numbers from select hospitals for March and April of 2019 (historical baseline) and 2020. RESULTS: The overall survey response rate was 73.7% (n = 73). With an estimated operative volume reduction of 63.3% for general surgery cases, over 90% of residents expressed concern about the decline in operative exposure. While the senior residents tended to work more shifts, they were not more likely to have higher risk perception scores for contracting COVID-19 nor higher anxiety levels about the possibility of contracting COVID-19. They were, however, significantly more likely to have high GAD-7 scores (≥ 10) when compared to interns (z = −2.82, p-adj = 0.014). Overall, residents were more concerned about the general health of loved ones than about their own risk of contracting COVID-19 (U = 3897.5, p < 0.01). CONCLUSIONS: While the work-related experiences of residents varied across a number of factors during the pandemic, residents tended to report similar sources of anxiety. Moving forward, surgical residency training programs will need to develop ways to optimize available surgical experiences and address the unique resident anxieties that an infectious pandemic presents.