COVID-19 Pandemic Support Programs for Healthcare Workers and Implications for Occupational Mental Health: A Narrative Review Psychiatric Quarterly Springer Nature Link
By building a comprehensive mental health toolkit, healthcare workers can better manage their mental health and maintain their overall well-being. Building a personal mental health toolkit is essential for healthcare workers to maintain their mental wellness. By integrating self-care into their daily routines, healthcare workers can enhance their mental wellness and build resilience. Self-care is essential for healthcare workers to maintain their mental health and well-being. This service ensures that healthcare workers can receive immediate support in a format that is convenient for them.
- Rieckert et al. (92) conducted a scoping review of 73 papers focusing on the impact of COVID-19-like working conditions on the physical and/or mental health of healthcare professionals in a hospital setting, as well as on interventions, measures and policies to preserve physical and/or mental health.
- The name of the program – Pause a Moment – is a reminder that engaging, even if briefly, in a mentally supportive action can make a difference in a stressful situation, she added.
- Research suggests that 93% of front-line medical workers were stressed, 86% were anxious, and over 75% reported frustration, exhaustion, burnout, and feelings of overwhelm.
- Meanwhile, authoritative information also eliminates rumors and prevents excessive pressure on health care workers.
1 Shifting the burden: from individual resilience to organizational resilient culture
Mental health support isn’t just about individual well-being; it affects patient care, healthcare system stability, and workforce retention. Transparent communication, mental health awareness training, and manager-led wellness check-ins significantly reduce stress and burnout. When hospital leadership prioritizes mental health, workers feel valued, supported, and encouraged to seek help.
Frontline worker burnout signs: How to recognize, prevent, and act before it’s too late
Health care workers who treated people with COVID-19 built a stronger camaraderie with colleagues as a result of their shared experience.22 This may be similar to shared experiences of working during the 2003 SARS outbreak in helping to mitigate distress. Multivariable logistic Motivational interviewing for behavior change regression analyses were performed on previous univariable models; these were shown to be significant and were adjusted for age, gender, type of health care work, hypnotic medication use, alcohol use and work experience during the 2003 SARS outbreak in Toronto. Zhou et al. (pp. 189–199) report the results of a survey that compares the mental health outcomes of US-born and immigrant caregivers. In this editorial, the authors urge health leaders to act with regard to occupationally-related mental health burdens and emphasize NIOSH’s commitment to provide support to them in that task.
Lay coaches also should be knowledgeable of available resources and well-supported throughout the process of connecting clients to professional services. To be optimally successful, lay coach-delivered programs like CFA ideally should be embedded within infrastructures that can support connecting individuals with higher levels of care. Even with their training and in a system with an established infrastructure for connecting employees to professional mental health services, CFA coaches reported struggling to connect clients in need with mental health professionals. However, only 22.7% of coaches agreed that it was easy for them to make connections to mental health services for clients in need, and 68.2% said that this was only somewhat true for them. Most commonly noted issues were emotional concerns (55.9% of clients), physical symptoms (25.1% of clients), and other specific concerns (e.g., COVID-19 topics, financial concerns, family/relationship stress, workplace issues; 24.4% of clients).
Time Commitment for Participants
However, workforce well-being is not an area where savings should be made; one worker’s burnout will cost far more than the money spent on well-executed and timely counselling and could either prevent or reduce the time in absences and help build long-term resilience. “We know public health settings are stressful environments, and particularly so when many are now facing economic challenges. While both agree that employers need to promote a culture of open discussion and recognize the vulnerability of staff, Petri believes that organizations must also be willing to make sufficient financial investment in health worker well-being. “It is well known that health workers often have to cope with high workloads, long working hours and a lack of flexibility, all of which impact on their mental and physical health,” says Petri.