Mental health care for medical staff in China during the COVID-19 outbreak

By Qiongni Chen, Mining Liang, Yamin Li, Jincai Guo, Dongxue Fei, Ling Wang, Li He, Caihua Sheng, Yiwen Cai, Xiaojuan Li and 2 more. Lancet psychiatry, 2020

1,777 citations recorded by the source corpus.

www.thelancet.com/psychiatry Vol 7 April 2020 e15 in addition to disease knowledge and protective measures, pre-job training was arranged to address identification of and responses to psychological problems in patients with COVID-19, and hospital security staff were available to be sent to help deal with uncooperative patients. Third, the hospital developed detailed rules on the use and management of protective equipment to reduce worry. Fourth, leisure activities and training on how to relax were properly arranged to help staff reduce stress. Finally, psychological counsellors regularly visited the rest area to listen to difficulties or stories encountered by staff at work, and provide support accordingly. More than 100 frontline medical staff can rest in the provided rest place, and most of them report feeling at home in this accomodation. Maintaining staff mental health is essential to better control infectious diseases, although the best approach to this during the epidemic season remains unclear. The learning from these psychological interventions is expected to help the Chinese government and other parts of the world to better respond to future unexpected infectious disease outbreaks.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b5e6440d46096d8dce2798893e817c6ac21c752a

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Citations in the corpus

Stress, anxiety, and depression levels in the initial stage of the COVID-19 outbreak in a population sample in the northern Spain. (2020, neutral): “26-60 (n = 347; M = 0,39; DT = 0,91) 36 (9,4) 21 (5,6) 7 (2,1) 12 (2,9)”
Unique epidemiological and clinical features of the emerging 2019 novel coronavirus pneumonia (COVID‐19) implicate special control measures (2020, background): “protective and therapeutic measures mentioned above, psychological interventions were expected to be helpful for infection control.(62)”
The mental health of healthcare workers in the COVID-19 pandemic: A systematic review (2020, background): “Major epidemic outbreaks pose an increasing demand for healthcare workers [3].”
Loneliness in the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic: Cross-sectional results from the COVID-19 Psychological Wellbeing Study (2020, background): “Being a keyworker during the pandemic has been associated with worse mental health outcomes [45,76,77].”
Knowledge, attitude, and practice regarding COVID-19 among healthcare workers in Henan, China (2020, background): “Overworked status A growing body of research demonstrates that HCW fa tigue increases risk of patient care errors and employee injuries [6, 7].”
Prevalence of stress, anxiety, depression among the general population during the COVID-19 pandemic: a systematic review and meta-analysis (2020, background): “Due to the pathogenicity of the virus, the rate of spread, the resulting high mortality rate, COVID-19 may affect the mental health of individuals at several layers of society, ranging from the infected patients, and health care workers, to families, children, students, patients with mental illness,”
The mental health impact of the covid-19 pandemic on healthcare workers, and interventions to help them: A rapid systematic review (2020, neutral): “Chen et al.’s 47 study was to understand why uptake of their psychological intervention was so low, and findings were identical to Chung et al.’s: “Many staff mentioned that they did not need a psychologist, but needed more rest without interruption and enough protective supplies” (p. e15).”