The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic posed an immediate challenge to the management
of hospitals in Germany and elsewhere. The risk of stress for front-line healthcare professionals
forced occupational health and safety units to adopt a variety of protective measures, not all of
which have been thoroughly validated. The main objective of the present analysis is to assess
what the most important sources of stress were and which of the protective measures applied to
counteract stress among healthcare staff had the greatest impact. A better understanding of these
factors will improve hospital management and worker safety in a future health crisis situation and
may also prove to be beneficial in non-crisis situations. For this purpose, in 2020, an exploratory,
cross-sectional and quantitative study using a questionnaire created for this purpose was carried
out on a total of 198 professionals—133 nurses and 65 physicians—at the Klinikum Mittelbaden
Balg hospital in Baden-Baden, Germany, during the first wave of the pandemic. Statistical analyses
showed that nurses suffer more stress than physicians and that stress is higher among professionals
in critical care and emergency units than in units that are less exposed to infected patients. It was
also found that measures such as salary incentives, encouragement of work in well-integrated teams,
and perceived support from hospital management mitigate stress. These findings highlight the
importance of support measures from management and superiors. Knowing the actual effectiveness
of the measures applied by management and the factors mentioned above could help to protect
healthcare professionals in the event of another pandemic or similar situations and may still be of
value in dealing with the continuing COVID-19 pandemic.
