The purpose of this chapter is to discuss healthcare workers' (HCW) working conditions under the COVID-19 pandemic, including their challenges and needs. Through a brief systematic review, PubMed, and Science Direct, the authors searched up to mid-September 2021. Twenty-seven studies were included in the analysis. The majority addressed mental health issues reported by HCWs in COVID-19 times arising from their respective workplace for several reasons: fear of infection, lack of personal protective equipment (PPE), insufficient training, among others. The authors also found evidence of other subjects concerning working conditions of HCWs in COVID-19 times, such as physical health, job satisfaction, safety, and training. Empirical evidence urges the establishment of a number of interventions concerning HCWs' working conditions under the COVID-19 pandemic to mitigate risks, especially those tackling mental health issues; to train HCWs in dealing with the pandemic and their resilience; and to have HCWs safely and satisfyingly working.
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Research on social themes regarding public health has shown to be of uttermost importance and, as so, it has been developing over the years, as researchers point out (Hammig & Bauer, 2013). For example, regarding social capital (SC), there are reports that indicate it has been around for more than 20 years and, in this context, having more SC seems to be associated with better health outcomes, notwithstanding the negative relationship that few studies have found linking SC with health (Moore & Kawachi, 2017; Villalonga-Olives & Kawachi, 2015).
Although there are only a few, in the social sciences theme, namely working conditions, studies like Ariza-Montes, et al. (2013) suggested that the chance of a healthcare worker referring to him/herself as bullied increases among those who work on a shift schedule, perform monotonous and rotating tasks, suffer from work stress, enjoy little satisfaction from their working conditions, and do not perceive opportunities for promotions in their organizations. But there don’t seem to exist a wide range of studies concerning HCW’s working conditions.
Nowadays we are experiencing firsthand an unprecedented pandemic, with implications in global health, economy, and people’s lives, among others (Crimi & Carlucci, 2020), which leads us to agree about the importance of maintaining healthcare workers’ working conditions to guarantee our collective well-being.
In fact, the World Health Organization (WHO) and several other organizations whose goal is to direct health, internationally and locally as this, like the Directorate-General for Health (DGS) does in Portugal as do like-minded organizations specific to their own countries, agree that infectious diseases like the one arisen from COVID-19, as well as other examples such as MERS, EBOLA and HIV, pose serious risks to widespread transmission, culminating ultimately in death among populations (Institute of Medicine – US, Committee on Xenograft Transplantation).
By the December 2020, COVID-19 became the leading cause of death in the U.S. (Woolf et al., 2020) as it did in many countries worldwide, according to the WHO (Wang & Zhang, 2020).
Data from the early days of this pandemic suggested COVID-19 to spread exponentially (Remuzzi & Remuzzi, 2020) however, longer-term and more current data, argues that, while COVID-19 spread in China is sub-exponential (Maier & Brockmann, 2020), it is driven by the implementation of strong non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as social distancing (Fergusson et al., 2020) or the use of face masks (Kumar et al., 2020).
It is now widely accepted that a range of factors impact the disease’s outcome which can ultimately lead to significant morbidity and mortality, in a syndrome that seems to impact older people, who present a higher chance of respiratory complications and death (Zhou et al., 2020). These factors seem to be further influenced by the availability of healthcare resources (Emanuel et al., 2020).
In this context, it is not surprising that the focus has shifted towards Healthcare Workers (HCW) (Preti et al, 2020) and Healthcare Professionals (HCP) (Gorini et al., 2020), herein jointly named HCW, as they are the ones responsible for our well-being as a collective (Rabow et al., 2021).