Methods
A cross-sectional survey was conducted amongst Otorhinolaryngologists
(ORLs) practicing in India by widely advertising on various social media
platforms, an online hosted digital questionnaire (Appendix 1) .
Participation in the anonymous survey was voluntary, an informed consent
was taken from all the participants at the beginning of the survey and
participants could terminate the survey at any time they desired. The
survey was conducted between 18th April 2020 and
10th May 2020. India was under lockdown since
25th March 2020. This was the time when government was
contemplating on how to implement a phased un-lock, which eventually
started on 8th June 2020. Hence the timing of survey
coincides with the time when the ORLs must be grappling with the
questions on how to restart their practice and how to reshape their
standard operating procedures.
The questionnaire captured demographic parameters like age, gender and
location of the practicing ORLs. It took into account the difference in
risk perceptions depending upon the workplace and technical title of the
respondent. Few of the questions were aimed to assess the personnel
protective equipment (PPE) used by the doctors and its impact on
economics of running a clinical practice. The data including the
technical title/professional designation was self-reported by the
participants. Validated scales to know about stress were not used as
that would have made the questionnaire very long. A scale of 1 to 10 was
used to measure the stress which was divided in to low (1-3),
intermediate (4-7) and high (8-10) categories. The questionnaire was
pretested, face and content validity was checked by the experts. The
survey began with a question asking, whether you are an ORL and those
who answered in negative were automatically eliminated from the survey.
Data collected was exported to Microsoft Excel 2013 (Microsoft
Corporation) software (Appendix 2, in PDF) , cleaned and
analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version
24. Proportions of different categories were estimated. Differences in
proportions between groups were considered significant at 95%
confidence level.