An Investigation into the Relation of Coping Skills with Mental Health and Quality of Life in Family Members of Nurses During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Objectives: During the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, health care workers, including nurses and their family members, experienced various psychological problems. Coping skills may help them deal with the current challenge and maintain their mental health and improve their quality of life. Therefore, this study investigated the relation of coping skills with mental health and quality of life of the nurses' family members during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted on the family members of the nurses working at Hajar Hospital of Shahrekord dedicated to admission and hospitalization of COVID-19 infected patients using a census sampling method in 2020. Participation in this study was voluntary and finally 220 persons were included in this study. To prevent the spread of COVID-19 through respiratory droplets or contact, a weblog was created using blogging software that contained questionnaires for collecting data on demographic information, mental health (PHQ-9), coping skills (coping responses inventory [CRI], Billings & Moos), and quality of life (SF-36). The collected data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistical tests in SPSS software version 22 (IBM Corp, Armonk, NY).

Results: Of the 220 participants in this study, 101 participants were male and 119 were female. The mean age of the subjects was 35.78 years, and 56.4% of them had an academic education level. The Pearson correlation analysis showed a significant relationship between coping skills and mental health, quality-of-life items, total quality-of-life score, and demographic variables of participants (except education) (P < 0.05). This was a direct relationship in such a way that as the score of coping skills increases, so does the score of mental health and quality of life. Based on the results of regression analysis, the predictive power of mental health, coping skills, and education level was obtained to be 0.634. The coping skill variable was the strongest predictor (ß = 0.467), and after that, the mental health variable (ß = 0.421) had the highest predictive power.

Conclusion: The obtained results showed that coping skill is the association between psychological health and quality of life such that the coping skill has a significant direct effect on psychological health and quality of life. The results also showed that, at the time of crisis, further attention should be paid to coping skills to develop and improve the quality of life and psychological health.

Keywords: COVID-19; Coping skill; coronavirus disease; family members of the nurses; mental health; quality of life.