Search the hub
Showing results for tags 'Anxiety'.
Found 71 results
-
Content ArticleThe COVID-19 pandemic is a traumatic event for many, particularly those in the caring professions. Experts are predicting a significant “second curve” of mental health problems among both healthcare workers and the public related to prolonged social isolation, loss of economic opportunity, grief from losing loved ones, among other causes. While there has been no shortage of resources and recommendations designed to help healthcare workers manage stress during the pandemic, there’s a tendency to place the burden on the individual. At a minimum, it is important that remedies acknowledge the shared responsibility of the healthcare system for creating the conditions for fear, anxiety, and burnout in the first place. In an effort to streamline, provide sensemaking, and support care teams during this critical time, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) synthesised themes from several key publications, expert interviews, and five years of experience gained by partnering with health systems around the world to address staff well-being and joy in work. Three key areas to focus on have emerged, along with specific actions healthcare leaders can take to support their workforce and address the more immediate and longer-term effects of the pandemic.
-
Content ArticleHave you ever been faced with an upcoming shift at work and felt an impending sense of doom? It comes as no surprise that doctors — real, human people — have a certain degree of anticipation, even anxiety, when it comes to taking shifts. Katie Townes, a physician and founder of Physician Lounge Online, shares her path to on-call acceptance.
-
Content ArticleIn this article published in the British Columbia Medical Journal, Drs Richard Merchant and Matt Kurrek encourage the use of capnographic monitoring to improve the safety of patients undergoing procedural sedation.
-
Content ArticleAn adverse clinical event, patient safety incident or medical error can have a far-reaching impact not only for the patient and their families, the 'first victims', but also the healthcare professionals involved. These are sometimes referred to as ‘second victims’. Often there are few opportunities for second victim healthcare professionals to discuss the details of incidents or events and share how this has affected them personally. The East Midlands Patient Safety Collaborative (EMPSC) funded the University of Leicester as part of their National Safety Culture workstream to develop a Second Victim Support Unit within the Children’s Hospital at University Hospitals Leicester to test whether models of support established in the US could be successfully transferred to UK health settings.
-
Content ArticleNHS England awarded 'Improving Access to Psychological Therapies' (IAPT) services in the Oxford AHSN region ‘Early Implementer’ funding to lead the way in setting up integrated treatments for patients with long-term conditions (LTCs) alongside mental illness. Four of the first 22 services selected nationally were in the Oxford AHSN region. This study was carried out by health economist Professor David Stuckler, formerly of the University of Oxford, now based at the University of Bocconi, Italy, supported by NHS South, Central West Commissioning Support Unit. It focused on one of the first groups of patients (more than 450 people) who started receiving new integrated IAPT-LTC treatments in 2017.
-
Content Article
Anxiety UK videos
Patient Safety Learning posted an article in Mental health
Anxiety UK have produced a number of videos to help you cope during the pandemic. -
Content Article
Bitter pill – A paramedic's tale
Anonymous posted an article in Florence in the Machine
What impact does working on the frontline in healthcare have on your own mental health? How do you cope with the daily traumatic events you see at work and then go home and care for your family? What happens when you start to feel out of control? In this blog, a paramedic recounts their feelings and fear when things started to get out of control at work and at home, describing the symptoms of 'moral injury', and how talking openly to colleagues, their line-manager and to a counsellor helped them to recover. -
Content Article
Free Headspace Ap access for NHS workers
Claire Cox posted an article in Suggest a useful website
Meditation has been shown to help people stress less, focus more and sleep better. Headspace is meditation made simple, teaching you life-changing mindfulness skills in just a few minutes a day. -
Content ArticleLoosening the lockdown too much now will not do our health, the economy, or people’s livelihoods any good, argue KK Cheng and Wenjie Gong in this article published in The BMJ Opinion.
-
Content ArticleThis is a guide from the British Psychological Society, for leaders and managers of healthcare services who will need to consider the wellbeing needs of all healthcare staff (clinical and non-clinical) as a result of the Coronavirus outbreak. It offers practical recommendations for how to respond at individual, management and organisational level involving the appropriate utilisation of expertise within their practitioner psychologist and mental health professionals and anticipates the psychological reactions over time, and what people may need to recovery psychologically from this.
-
Content ArticleCumulative stress, compassion fatigue and trauma due to experiences with patient safety incidents impact the mental wellness of our healthcare providers. These factors contribute to inadvertent patient care errors, mental health issues and attrition which compromise patient safety. A peer support programme not only simply helps healthcare workers with their experiences with patient safety incidents but also improves the system and help make patient care safe. The Creating a Safe Space: Addressing the Psychological Safety of Healthcare Workers manuscript and the Canadian Peer Support Network are intended to assist healthcare organisations create peer-to-peer support programmes (PSPs) to improve the emotional well-being of healthcare workers and allow them to provide the best and safest care to their patients.
-
Content ArticleRadio 4's Women's Hour programme discusses coronavirus and the impact the current pandemic is having on access to cervical screening services. Later in the programme, the discussion turns to the topic of dealing with addiction during the lockdown. Cervical screening (listen from the start of the recording) Speakers, Kate Sanger, Head of Public Affairs at Jo's Cervical Cancer Trust, and consultant gynaecologist Dr Christine Ekechi stress that patients should not hesitate to contact their GP if they have any concerns or symptoms. Symptoms might include: abnormal bleeding, bleeding after sex, bleeding after the menopause, bleeding in between periods, unexplained pelvic pain and in some cases increased vaginal discharge. Addiction (21:45) According to the charity Action on Addiction, one in three people are addicted to something. How difficult can it be to remain sober or clean in lockdown, and what support can you still access? Speakers include Holly Sexton, Substance Misuse Practitioner at We Are With You, and Caroline Turriff, a freelance journalist who is 15 years in recovery. They discuss whether opiate painkillers and methadone being more easily available through pharmacies creates safety issues. Caroline argues that it will reduce the risk of people obtaining opiates online or heroin via street dealers which she says could enable them to obtain life-threatening amounts.
-
Content Article
Swimming with the tide, a blog by Sally Howard
Sally Howard posted an article in Leadership for patient safety
We have an overwhelming demand for our healthcare services. This blog from Sally Howard suggests some things we can do to keep afloat. -
Content ArticleA study from Jackson et al. looked at how the prevalence of psychological distress in the adult population of England has changed since 2020. The study found that the proportion reporting any psychological distress was similar in December 2022 to that in April 2020 (an extremely difficult and uncertain moment of the COVID-19 pandemic), but the proportion reporting severe distress was 46% higher. These findings provide evidence of a growing mental health crisis in England and underscore an urgent need to address its cause and to adequately fund mental health services.
-
Content ArticleThe Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme began in 2008 and has transformed the treatment of adult anxiety disorders and depression in England. IAPT services offer: talking therapies, such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), counselling, other therapies, and guided self-help help for common mental health problems, like anxiety and depression.
-
Content ArticleThese online resources are designed to help healthcare professionals improve conversations with their patients about suicidal ideation, self-harm and other common mental health problems. The resources are based on a field of research known as Conversation Analysis, which micro-analyses verbal and non-verbal communication to study the consequences of different ways of communicating. Resources include research findings and real examples from video-recorded psychosocial assessments with mental health nurses, social workers and other healthcare professionals. To access the resources, you need to be a healthcare professional and will need to create an account.
-
Content Article
The King's Fund: Resources supporting our mental health and wellbeing
Sam posted an article in Mental health
The King's Fund has collected some examples of resources to support the mental health and wellbeing of both individuals and teams working across health and care. -
Content ArticleAnxiety is a feeling of unease, like a worry or fear, that can be mild or severe. Everyone feels anxious from time to time and it usually passes once the situation is over. It can make our heart race, we might feel sweaty, shaky or short of breath. Anxiety can also cause changes in our behaviour, such as becoming overly careful or avoiding things that trigger anxiety. When anxiety becomes a problem, our worries can be out of proportion with relatively harmless situations. It can feel more intense or overwhelming, and interfere with our everyday lives and relationships. This self help guide, produced by Southern Health and Social Care Trust, explains what anxiety is, why it occurs and how to manage anxiety.
-
Content Article
Mandy Anderton is a Clinical Nurse specialising in learning disability and a hub Topic Leader. In this new blog, Mandy explains how they are using shared decision making and reasonable adjustments to implement a new care pathway, where patients with a learning disability needing to undergo a medical investigation can receive deep sedation within their own home. Working with patients, carers, relatives, anaesthetists and others, the aim is to improve access to important medical investigations with minimal distress, where other avenues have been exhausted. -
Content Article
Anxiety booklet: Dementia
Claire Cox posted an article in Learning disabilities
Most people experience anxiety at some point in their life, but this may be more acute for a person with a learning disability or autism who then develops dementia. If a person has a history of being anxious or of living with a condition, particularly conditions like OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder), phobias or panic disorders that makes them anxious, developing dementia may then make that worse. The person's communication skills may have diminished due to their dementia, leaving them frustrated at being unable to express themselves and anxious about the consequences of this. -
Content Article
Standing tall in the storm, a blog by Sally Howard
Sally Howard posted an article in Leadership for patient safety
We know the link between anxiety, stress, burnout and patient safety. This blog from Sally Howard suggests four things we can do to help us stand tall and continue to grow from strength to strength, both for ourselves and for our teams.
