Impact of Burnout on Cardiovascular and Immune Biomarkers in Healthcare Professionals - Covid-19 Pandemic in Abu Dhabi

Introduction: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has created new and
unpredictable challenges for healthcare systems. Healthcare professionals are heavily
affected by this rapidly changing situation. They may experience psychological burden,
especially nurses, women, and frontline health care professionals directly engaged in the
diagnosis, treatment, and care for patients with COVID-19. The objective of this study is to
investigate the evolution of psychosocial, cardiovascular and immune markers in healthcare
professionals with different levels of exposure to the COVID-19 pandemic. The effects of the
pandemic work burden on psychological, cardiovascular and immune biomarkers will be
stratified per level of exposure to the COVID-19 pandemic, positive diagnosis to COVID-19,
profession, sex, age and already existent cardiovascular risk.

Methods: A STROBE compliant, blended exploratory study involving online and onsite approach
with wearable monitoring will be implemented. A planned random probability sample of
residents, staff physicians, nurses and auxiliary healthcare professionals will be recruited
from both inpatient and outpatient medicine services will be stratified by exposure to
COVID-19 pandemic (frontline versus second line). In a first step, will be an online
recruitment with e-consent and e-survey with Maslach Burnout Inventory, Fuster-BEWAT score
and sociodemographic characteristics, and planning for onsite visit; in a second step, will
be a setup for wearable monitoring of heart rate, actimetry and sleep quality together with
blood sampling for immune biomarkers; steps 1 & 2 will be repeated at 2-3 months, 6 months.
Power BI & Tableau will be used for data visualization purposes, while the front-end data
capture application will be used for data collection and will be built using specific
survey/questionnaire related tools for healthcare usage data linkage.

Ethics and dissemination: Institutional Review Board approval has been obtained from Khalifa
University (protocol # CPRA-2020-034) and Department of Health-Abu Dhabi (protocol #
CVDC-20-05/2020-8). Data analysis, release of results and publication of manuscripts are
scheduled to start in early 2021. Data and findings may be useful to healthcare policymakers
for developing preventive strategies to reduce or prevent burnout, cardiovascular risk and
immune dysfunction.