Investigating Psychological Differences Between Nurses and Other Health Care Workers From the Asia-Pacific Region During the Early Phase of COVID-19: Machine Learning Approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: As the COVID-19 pandemic evolves, challenges in frontline work continue to impose a significant psychological impact on nurses. However, there is a lack of data on how nurses fared compared to other health care workers in the Asia-Pacific region. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to investigate (1) the psychological outcome characteristics of nurses in different Asia-Pacific countries and (2) psychological differences between nurses, doctors, and nonmedical health care workers. METHODS: Exploratory data analysis and visualization were conducted on the data collected through surveys. A machine learning modeling approach was adopted to further discern the key psychological characteristics differentiating nurses from other health care workers. Decision tree-based machine learning models (Light Gradient Boosting Machine, GradientBoost, and RandomForest) were built to predict whether a set of psychological distress characteristics (ie, depression, anxiety, stress, intrusion, avoidance, and hyperarousal) belong to a nurse. Shapley Additive Explanation (SHAP) values were extracted to identify the prominent characteristics of each of these models. The common prominent characteristic among these models is akin to the most distinctive psychological characteristic that differentiates nurses from other health care workers. RESULTS: Nurses had relatively higher percentages of having normal or unchanged psychological distress symptoms relative to other health care workers (n=233-260 [86.0%-95.9%] vs n=187-199 [74.8%-91.7%]). Among those without psychological symptoms, nurses constituted a higher proportion than doctors and nonmedical health care workers (n=194 [40.2%], n=142 [29.5%], and n=146 [30.3%], respectively). Nurses in Vietnam showed the highest level of depression, stress, intrusion, avoidance, and hyperarousal symptoms compared to those in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Nurses in Singapore had the highest level of anxiety. In addition, nurses had the lowest level of stress, which is the most distinctive psychological outcome characteristic derived from machine learning models, compared to other health care workers. Data for India were excluded from the analysis due to the differing psychological response pattern observed in nurses in India. A large number of female nurses emigrating from South India could not have psychologically coped well without the support from family members while living alone in other states. CONCLUSIONS: Nurses were least psychologically affected compared to doctors and other health care workers. Different contexts, cultures, and points in the pandemic curve may have contributed to differing patterns of psychological outcomes amongst nurses in various Asia-Pacific countries. It is important that all health care workers practice self-care and render peer support to bolster psychological resilience for effective coping. In addition, this study also demonstrated the potential use of decision tree-based machine learning models and SHAP value plots in identifying contributing factors of sophisticated problems in the health care industry.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".