COVID-19 Pandemic: Impact of Quarantine on Medical Students' Mental Wellbeing and Learning Behaviors.

Content Provider	Europe PMC
Author	Meo, Sultan Ayoub Abukhalaf, Abdulelah Adnan Alomar, Ali Abdullah Sattar, Kamran Klonoff, David C
Copyright Year	2020
Abstract	Background and Objectives:The novel coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic causes great public health and socioeconomic harms. Worldwide many countries implemented quarantine policies to minimize the spread of this highly contagious disease. The present study aim was to investigate the impact of quarantine on the medical students’ mental wellbeing and learning behaviors.Methods:In this descriptive study, we used a questionnaire with a Five-Point Likert Scale to collect the information. The questionnaire was distributed among 625 medical students through their emails with a response rate of 530 (84.8%), majority 294 (55.47%) being female. The survey questionnaire consisted of total 20 items; 12 items were related to psychological wellbeing and stress-allied queries and 08 items were about learning behaviors.Results:The findings encompass two important characteristics related to quarantine, psychological wellbeing, and learning behaviors. A combined cohort of 234 medical students, either female or male, (which was 44.1% of the total responders) showed a sense of being emotionally detached from family, friends and fellow students, 125/ 530 (23.5%) medical students felt disheartened. Both female and male medical students showed a marked decrease in their overall work performance. Moreover, 56.2% of the total students (61.5% of the females and 49.5% of the males) felt a decrease in the time they spent studying.Conclusions:Both female and male medical students have identified that quarantine has caused them to feel emotionally detached from family, fellows, and friends and decrease their overall work performance and study period. The findings also show that one fourth of the medical students who participated in this study felt disheartened during the quarantine period. The long-term quarantine due to COVID-19 pandemics may causes further worsening in the psychological and learning behaviors of these medical students.
ISSN	1682024X
Volume Number	36
PubMed Central reference number	PMC7306952
Issue Number	COVID19-S4
Issue Number	covid19-s4
PubMed reference number	32582313
Journal	Pakistan Journal of Medical Sciences [Pak J Med Sci]
e-ISSN	1681715X
DOI	10.12669/pjms.36.COVID19-S4.2809
Language	English
Publisher	Professional Medical Publications
Publisher Date	2020-05-01
Publisher Place	Pakistan
Access Restriction	Open
Rights License	This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Copyright: © Pakistan Journal of Medical Sciences
Subject Keyword	COVID 19 Quarantine Mental Wellbeing Learning Behaviors
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Medicine