Abstract
BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic is causing widespread morbidity and mortality. It has led to a myriad of mental health problems, particularly in health care providers (HCPs). To strengthen the fight against COVID-19, it is essential to investigate the mental health challenges being faced by the HCPs, their emotional responses, and coping strategies. OBJECTIVES: We aimed to explore the lived experiences of frontline HCPs in rural India during the peak of the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. METHODS: Through purposive heterogenous snowball sampling, five HCPs in rural Dhanbad were recruited and one-on-one double-blind unstructured interviews were conducted. The interviews were transcribed and master themes and subthemes were extracted by interpretative phenomenological analysis. RESULTS: Six master themes and 23 subthemes were identified. Our findings demonstrate that the participants were under mental duress due to heavy workloads, fear of getting infected and transmitting the infection, urban-rural disparities in access to medical supplies and peer support, and negative social perception of HCPs during the pandemic. Most HCPs have not yet processed the psychological effects of being at the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic in a resource-poor setting; however, spirituality seems to be an important coping mechanism that helps them get through the day. CONCLUSIONS: This study is unique in the sense that not many studies have been conducted to evaluate the psychological issues of Indian HCPs during this pandemic. Much less is known about the mental health of HCPs in rural settings. Moreover, novel findings such as negative social perception of HCPs during the pandemic and HCPs resorting to spirituality as a coping strategy against stress, open a plethora of research opportunities wherein the results of this qualitative study, along with the existing literature and findings of future quantitative studies, can establish better understanding of the impact of the pandemic on HCPs.