Healthcare workers in England experience PTSD at twice the rate of the general public

Healthcare workers in England experience post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at twice the rate of the general public, according to a new study co-led by UCL researchers. The research, published in The Lancet Psychiatry, was conducted as part of a wider study to establish a more accurate prevalence of mental disorders within the NHS workforce. The study, co-led by the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King's College London and the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) ARC North Thames at UCL (led by Professor Rosalind Raine, UCL Applied Health Research) in collaboration with NHS trusts, also found that one in five healthcare workers met the threshold for diagnosable illnesses like depression and anxiety. Researchers recruited participants from the NHS CHECK study, the UK's largest survey of the mental health and wellbeing of all NHS staff during Covid-19. More than 23,000 participants completed commonly used self-report measures, which look for symptoms of common mental disorders like depression and anxiety as well as PTSD. This particular study reported on diagnostic interviews with two smaller groups of healthcare workers, which were broadly representative of NHS staff overall in terms of ethnicity, age, sex and clinical role (n=243 and n=94 to establish the prevalence of common mental disorders and PTSD, respectively). While there have been many studies of the mental health of healthcare workers, especially since the pandemic, the vast majority of these have relied on self-reported screening tools that often over-estimate prevalence of mental disorder.