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

Mean ± SD Order intrusive symptoms cluster 1.90 ± 0.67 1 avoidance symptoms cluster 1.68 ± 0.58 3 hyper-arousal symptoms cluster 1.74 ± 0.65 2 than those without training and experience. This result is in line with the fact that stress symptoms are related to the degree of exposure to a stressful event [20] . However, Declercq found no relationship between the frequency of encountering critical incidents and the occurrence of PTSD symptoms [21] . Jiahong [12] found that knowledge on H1N1 and exposure to H1N1 patients could not predict stress symptoms. However, those medical staff members with different education backgrounds and were working in different departments showed no differences in their PTSD levels. This study has several potential limitations. First, the measures of stress symptoms used in this study may be vulnerable to inherent bias because of their self-reported nature. However, the PCL-C is a validated measure of stress symptoms [22] . Second, the participants were recruited through convenient sampling, thereby introducing some bias in the sample and reducing the generalizability of the results. Third, this study adopted a limited sample, that is, we only focused on those medical staff members who were exposed to H7N9 patients in some cities of Anhui Province between January 2015 and May 2016. Future studies must adopt a larger sample, perform multicenter randomized controlled trials, and use objective and quantitative measurements to evaluate PTSD levels.