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Record W4406741679 · doi:10.1016/j.jad.2025.01.109

An umbrella review and meta-analysis of 87 meta-analyses examining healthcare workers' mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic

2025· review· en· W4406741679 on OpenAlexafffund
Vincent Boucher, Maria Dahl, Jayden Lee, Guy Faulkner, Mark R. Beauchamp, Eli Puterman

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Affective Disorders · 2025
Typereview
Languageen
FieldPsychology
TopicCOVID-19 and Mental Health
Canadian institutionsUniversity of CalgaryUniversity of British Columbia
FundersFonds de Recherche du Québec - SantéCanadian Institutes of Health ResearchMichael Smith Health Research BC
KeywordsCoronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)PandemicMeta-analysis2019-20 coronavirus outbreakMental healthSevere acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)Health careBetacoronavirusPsychiatryMEDLINEMedicinePsychologyVirologyPolitical scienceDiseaseOutbreakPathologyInfectious disease (medical specialty)

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

During the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare workers (HCWs) experienced several changes in their work (e.g., longer hours, new policies) that affected their mental health. In this study, an umbrella review and meta-analysis of meta-analyses was conducted to examine the prevalence of various mental health problems experienced by HCWs during the COVID-19 pandemic. We conducted a systematic review searching PubMed, EMBASE, PsycINFO, Cochrane Library, and Scopus databases (PROSPERO: CRD42022304823). We performed a meta-analysis to summarize prevalence of different mental health problems and examined whether these differed as a function of job category, sex/gender, sociodemographic index (SDI), and across time. Eighty-seven meta-analyses were included in the umbrella review and meta-analysis, including 1846 non-overlapping articles and 9,400,962 participants. The overall prevalence ratio for the different mental health outcomes ranged from 0.20 for PTSD (95 % CI: 0.16-0.25) to 0.44 for burnout (95 % CI: 0.32-0.56), with ratios for depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms, psychological distress, perceived stress, sleep problems, and insomnia symptoms falling between these ranges. Follow-up analyses revealed little variation in outcomes across job category, and sex. Prevalence of mental health problems in HCWs was high during the pandemic. Administrators and policymakers worldwide need to address these growing problems through institutional policies and wellness programming.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.027
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.068
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (broad)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Meta-analysis · Consensus signal: Meta-analysis
GenreCandidate signal: Review · Consensus signal: Review
Teacher disagreement score0.979
Threshold uncertainty score0.143

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0270.068
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0050.003
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0210.058
Bibliometrics0.0140.012
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0060.003
Open science0.0030.003
Research integrity0.0030.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0050.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.440
GPT teacher head0.581
Teacher spread0.141 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

Study designMeta-analysis
Domainnot available
GenreReview

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".

Quick stats

Citations19
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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