Background: There is an immense impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on the psychological behavior of healthcare providers due to changing of the working load, financial issues, applying the preventative measures during dealing with the patients, etc. This in turn affects their delivery of the health services. Yet, very few studies have assessed these psychological alterations in community pharmacists. Objective: We aimed to assess the psychological and mental health changes of community pharmacists during COVID-19 early pandemic. Methods: A descriptive cross sectional study questionnaire promoted by both multiple social media platforms and face-to-face interview for community pharmacists in different regions of Alexandria, Egypt between July and September 2021. Results: A total of 1054 community pharmacists (males; 59.8% and females; 40.2%) participated. Young and single pharmacists had significantly high feelings of anxiety, insomnia, and suffering from eating disorders compared with elder and married pharmacists (p < 0.05). Full-time employed community pharmacists became significantly more nervousness and felt anxious than part-time pharmacists. Female, full-time and less experienced (< 5-year practice) pharmacists had significantly high reports of crying during their working time, and feeling hopeless and uncertain (p < 0.05). Conclusion: COVID-19 has high impact on the mental health of community pharmacists. In the future, regulatory bodies should implement proactive pandemic preparedness programs for sensitive categories of community pharmacists in order to ensure delivering of high quality of essential health services to the community.
Moustafa et al. (Wed,) studied this question.