Resilience and anxiety among intensive care unit professionals during the COVID‐19 pandemic

BACKGROUND: The situation of the COVID‐19 global pandemic has generated an unprecedented state of emergency worldwide that has had a psychological impact on health care workers working in the ICU and this has created the need to implement different psychological strategies. AIM: This study explores (a) the prevalence of symptoms associated with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), (b) the relationship between GAD symptoms and resilience skills, and (c) which of the resilience skills were associated with a probable GAD among the ICU professionals during the COVID‐19 pandemic. STUDY DESIGN: Cross‐sectional survey design. METHODS: We explored anxiety and resilience in 448 ICU health care workers using an online survey. RESULTS: The participants showed high resilience levels and more than half of them presented symptoms consistent with a possible diagnosis of GAD. The GAD symptoms were more prevalent among women, nursing assistants, interns, staff who worked on rotation and health care workers who had to attend to more than 20 COVID patients. Significant negative correlations between resilience skills and GAD symptoms were found. The multiple regression analysis showed that resilience skills contribute to 14.4% of the variance for GAD symptoms. The binary logistic regression showed that the only skill that had a significant and negative predictive effect was “I usually take things in my stride” (OR = 0.774, 95% CI 0.67, 0.88; P = .000). This ability was the differentiating skill between professionals who equal or exceed the cut‐off point established for the diagnosis of a probable GAD regarding those who do not. CONCLUSION: ICU professionals developed symptoms consistent with a possible diagnosis of GAD due to their exposure to extremely stressful circumstances. However, resilience skills acted as a protective factor. RELEVANCE TO CLINICAL PRACTICE: The importance of incorporating programmes that mitigate these psychological effects and to promote adaptive coping styles during pandemics has become a need after what ICU professionals have gone through.