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.

The new high-sensitivity cardiac troponin (hs-cTn) T-generation (gen) 6 assay has higher analytical sensitivity than the current hs-cTnT-gen5 assay, but its clinical performance is unknown. The authors aimed to assess the clinical performance and use-optimized cutoffs of the hs-cTnT-gen6 assay. In this secondary analysis of an international, prospective, diagnostic study with central adjudication, patients presenting with suspected myocardial infarction to the emergency department were enrolled. hs-cTnT-gen6 and hs-cTnT -gen5 were measured at the same time points. The analytical and diagnostic performance of hs-cTnT-gen6 were compared to hs-cTnT-gen5, and assay-specific cutoffs for the European Society of Cardiology 0/1- and 0/2-hour algorithms were derived and internally and externally validated. Among 3,346 patients, myocardial infarction was the final diagnosis in 616 (18.4%). The proportion of patients with concentrations above the upper reference limit and therefore having myocardial injury was lower for hs-cTnT-gen6 (35.9%) than for hs-cTnT-gen5 (43.5%; P < 0.001). Diagnostic accuracy at emergency department presentation, expressed as area under the curve, was 0.927 (95% CI: 0.918-0.937) for hs-cTnT-gen6 and 0.931 (95% CI: 0.921-0.94) for hs-cTnT-gen5. A gen6 cutoff of <6 ng/L ruled out non-ST-segment elevated myocardial infarction in 30.0% of patients with 100% sensitivity (95% CI: 99.4%-100%) irrespective of chest pain onset. An hs-cTnT-gen6 cutoff of 3 hours) or <18 ng/L together with a 0/1-hour delta of <2 ng/L ruled out 56.3% with a sensitivity of 99.7% (95% CI: 98.3%-99.9%). An hs-cTnT-gen6 concentration ≥112 ng/L or a 0/1-hour delta ≥10 ng/L ruled-in 20.0% with a specificity of 93.4% (95% CI: 92.0%-94.6%). An hs-cTnT-gen6 cutoff 3 hours) or <18 ng/L together with a 0/2-hour delta of <4 ng/L ruled out 51.1% with a sensitivity of 99.7% (95% CI: 98.1%-99.9%). An hs-cTnT-gen6 concentration ≥112 ng/L or a 0/2-hour delta ≥15 ng/L ruled-in 23.9% with a specificity 92.7% (95% CI: 90.8%-94.2%). Findings were consistent in sensitivity analyses as well as in the external validation cohort. The novel hs-cTnT-gen6 assay demonstrated excellent and comparable diagnostic performance to the established hs-cTnT-gen5 assay with fewer patients identified as having myocardial injury. Use-optimized, assay-specific cutoffs for the European Society of Cardiology 0/1- and 0/2-hour algorithms provided very high sensitivity and high specificity. (Advantageous Predictors of Acute Coronary Syndromes Evaluation Study [APACE]; NCT00470587).