Monitoring quality of life in the first half­year period of coronaviral infodemy in Ukraine

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic, political and economic factors, the latest technological advances, environmental changes in the world — all this significantly influenced the awareness of the quality of life by most of the population. For us, as clinicians and lecturers of the Department of Dermatology and Venereology with a course of cosmetology at Bogomolets National Medical University, this became obvious after the forced abandonment of the usual «live» teaching and the transition to distance learning at Zoom in March 2020, and at the same time the re-profiling of the clinical base of the department for inpatient treatment of only COVID-19 patients with the simultaneous discharge of specialized dermatological patients.During the pandemic, we were in fact deprived of the possibility of further professional contact with specialized patients with dermatological diseases. We only had the technical ability to contact the 4th year students of NMU online. It was decided to take advantage of this opportunity not only for their distance teaching of the basics of dermatovenerology, but also for determining (clarifying) their psychostatus with the help of appropriate tests. Objective — to conduct a remote monitoring study of the quality of life (QOL) indicators in young medical workers (students) against the background of the negative informative influence of the media due to the forced long-term stay in a stressful situation of lockdown and strict multi-week quarantine caused by the COVID19 pandemic. Materials and methods. QOL was assessed using the Health Status Survey (SF36) which is one of general (non-specialized) questionnaires. Results and discussion. During the period from March to June, there were noticeable changes in the self-esteem of somatically quite healthy fourth-year medical students of their own QOL, both on several SF-36 scales and in general. This was despite the fact that none of them and their family members were infected with COVID-19 or had any clinical manifestations of this disease for all 3 months. In general, during this time, the existing changes were negative, albeit to varying degrees, according to individual scales. In conditions of remote contact, it became technically possible and scientifically justified to use questionnaires to determine QOL in statistically significant samples of voluntary respondents. Conclusions. We find it hypothetically possible to consider changes in QOL self-esteem in general and according to individual SF-36 scales as a kind of unconventional but quite objective and visual diagnostic test for preclinical (early) determination of the threat of formation and development of psychosomatic disorders in any adult patient who saw a family doctor.