Is coronavirus lockdown taking a toll on mental health of medical students? A study using WHOQOL-BREF questionnaire

Abstract

Introduction: The Quality of life is a broad-ranging concept affected in a complex way by the person's physical health, psychological state, level of independence, social relationships, personal beliefs, and their relationship to salient features of their environment. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in many quarantine and isolation measures and lockdown of the nation for the foreseeable future. Although these initiatives are necessary to prevent the spread of coronavirus they may be causing adverse mental health effects. Medical students are backbone and future of the health system and the general public always looks up to them as a role model of society. With this background, this study aims to assess the quality of life among medical students during the lockdown period amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Material and methods: A self-administered, pretested, questionnaire based on World Health Organization Quality of Life: Brief Version (WHOQOL-BREF) standard quality of life was used. For internal reliability and structural validity, Cronbach's alpha coefficient and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) were calculated, respectively. t-test, one way ANOVA, and Pearson Chi-square test were used.

Results: The mean scores of domains of the present study were highest for the environmental domain (72.10 ± 13.0) followed by physical (67.23 ± 13.74), social (57.13 ± 20.1), and lowest for the psychological domain (52.10 ± 17.45). The level of internal consistency was found to be 0.883, which is considered as sufficiently reliable. One-third of the medical students were spending >6 h on-screen, and merely 15.6% were doing physical activity >1 h.

Conclusion: It was found that during this time of crisis medical students were weaker in the psychological domain of Quality of Life among all the four domains. Physical activity and screen time was an important factor to the QOL of students, and it is likely that students would benefit from increased physical activity and minimizing screen time.

Keywords: COVID-19; Coronavirus; lockdown; medical students; quality of life.

Figure 1

Perception of overall QoL and Satisfaction with Health among medical students during LOCKDOWN