Kidney transplant recipients and donors in Singapore felt less distressed during the COVID-19 pandemic than the general population around the world, reported clinician-scientist and kidney specialist Professor Tazeen H Jafar, from the Health Services and Systems Research Programme at Duke-NUS, and her colleagues.
While some 14 per cent of donors and recipients reported feeling anxious, stressed or depressed during the pandemic, Jafar and her colleagues, including Drs Sobhana Thangaraju and Terrence Kee from SingHealth, found that this was almost two times lower than the global average of 30 per cent in the general population and almost four times lower than high-risk individuals living with pre-existing conditions such as cancer, type 2 diabetes and COVID-19.
In the paper, published in BMC Nephrology, Jafar and her team placed this overall resilience to pandemic-induced psychological distress in the context of Singapore’s health policies and resources, attributing their findings to Singapore’s low COVID-19 rates and resulting low mortality, “which was likely due to efficient national responses and high-quality medical care,” they wrote.
“Specifically, since the start of the outbreak, the Singapore government had proactively established official COVID-19 resources and subscription services, as well as frequent briefings and press conferences by the Prime Minister and other officials, to keep the public informed of the latest COVID-19 situation in Singapore.”
In their paper, the team also pointed to robust contact tracing, mask-wearing, social distancing, financial aid schemes and the nationwide distribution of free masks and sanitisers as specific factors which helped alleviate psychological distress.
Where distress was associated with personal and social factors, the researchers saw an opportunity for implementing proactive health education policies: “Focused health education targeting younger adults, unmarried individuals, non-Singapore citizens, and those with worse health conditions could potentially prevent psychological distress in high-risk kidney transplant recipients and the donor population.”