Female health care professionals and repercussions of the Covid-19 pandemics: is it harder for them?

ABSTRACT

The Covid-19 pandemic promoted significant changes in everyone’s daily lives, but among health professionals, those were even more profound. It impacted personal, social and family relationships, bringing feelings of helplessness and insecurity, aggravated by the disastrous confrontation of the pandemic by the Federal Government in Brazil. The health workforce has been identified in the literature as mostly female. The social role of gender, added to the current context, aggravates the implications of the pandemic for women. This study analyzed the repercussions of the Covid-19 pandemic on different profiles of health professionals in the State of São Paulo. This is a descriptive study which used a semi-structured, online, validated questionnaire. The processing of quantitative data was made using Stata 13.0 software. Answers were compared according to the declared gender. The findings corroborate the literature on the prevalence of significant burden on health professionals and the discrepancy between burden factors identified by gender. Household overload was more present among women, reinforcing that they are unevenly affected. This situation weakens mental health, brings changes in mood, sleep, cognition, anxiety, physical discomfort, and pessimism. Our results reinforce the need for a gender perspective in actions and responses to the consequences that will arise as the pandemic advances and in the recovery of society in the post-pandemic period.

KEYWORDS
Covid-19; Pandemics; Health personnel; Gender and health; Mental health