Prevalence and related factors of post-traumatic stress disorder among medical staff members exposed to H7N9 patients

Tang, Liling; Pan, Lingling; Yuan, Liping; Zha, Lei

The participants were given a demographic information form that asked for their personal information (occupation, gender, age, professional title, and years of work experience), contact frequency with H7N9 patients, related training, and related experience. Afterward, the participants were asked to complete a self-reported questionnaire, the PTSD Checklist-Civilian Version (PCL-C), which was developed by an American PTSD research center following the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-IV [13] . This scale includes 17 items for evaluating three clusters of PTSD symptoms, including intrusive symptoms (Criterion B l-5 title), avoidance symptoms (Criterion C 6e12 title), and hyper-arousal symptoms (Criterion D 13e17 title). The study supported the value of the PCL-C as a screening instrument for PTSD. The reliability and validity of this instrument had been proven in previous research [13, 14] . The total PCL, intrusive, avoidance, and hyperarousal scores had Cronbach's alpha coefficients of 0.94, 0.85, 0.85, and 0.87, respectively, thereby indicating high internal consistency. The test retake correlation coefficients for the total PCL scores were 0.92 (P < 0.001) for immediate re-takers and 0.88 (P < 0.001) for participants with one-week retest intervals. The frequency of stress symptoms occurrence during the past four weeks was rated on a five-point scale ranging from 1 (not at all) to 5 (extremely). The total score ranged between 17 and 85, with a higher score indicating a higher chance for these patients to show PTSD symptoms. A previous study [15] suggested that the prevalence of PTSD symptoms could only be ascertained if the PCL-C scores were equal or greater than 38.