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News ArticleIn April, when the coronavirus outbreak was at its peak in the UK and tearing through hospitals, junior doctor Rebecca Thornton’s mental health took a turn for the worse and she ended up having to be sectioned. Even now, three months later, she cannot face going back to her job and thinks it will take her a year to recover from some of the horrors she saw while working on a Covid ward in a deprived area of London. “It was horrendous,” Thornton recalls. “It’s so harrowing to watch people die, day in, day out. Every time someone passed away, I’d say, ‘This is my fault’. Eventually I stopped eating and sleeping.” Thornton’s case may sound extreme but her experiences of working through Covid are far from unique. More than 1,000 doctors plan to quit the NHS over the government’s handling of the pandemic, according to a recent survey, with some citing burnout as a cause. A psychologist offering services to NHS staff throughout the UK, who asked to remain anonymous, has witnessed the toll on staff. “I’ve seen signs of PTSD in some healthcare workers,” she says. “Staff really stood up to the plate and worked incredibly hard. It was a crisis situation that moved very quickly ... After it subsided a little bit, the tiredness became very clear.” Roisin Fitzsimons, who is head of the Nightingale Academy, which provides a platform to share best practice in nursing and midwifery, and consultant nurse at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS foundation trust, also worries about the looming threat of an uncertain future. “Are our staff prepared? Do they have the resilience to go through this again? That’s the worry and that’s the unknown. Burnout is hitting people now. People are processing and realising what they’ve gone through.” Read full story Source: The Guardian, 8 September 2020
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Content Article
Eric Kutscher: First, do no harm—but did I?
Patient Safety Learning posted an article in Blogs
The cost of providing care during a pandemic is seeing firsthand the evolution of medical knowledge, and wishing current data could have guided past decisions, says Eric Kutscher in this BMJ Opinion article. -
News ArticleOver 1,000 doctors plan to quit the NHS because they are disillusioned with the government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and frustrated about their pay, a new survey has found. The doctors either intend to move abroad, take a career break, switch to private hospitals or resign to work as locums instead, amid growing concern about mental health and stress levels in the profession. “NHS doctors have come out of this pandemic battered, bruised and burned out”, said Dr Samantha Batt-Rawden, president of the Doctors’ Association UK, which undertook the research. The large number of medics who say they will leave the NHS within three years is “a shocking indictment of the government’s failure to value our nation’s doctors,” she added. “These are dedicated professionals who have put their lives on the line time and time again to keep patients in the NHS safe, and we could be about to lose them.
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Content ArticleWe all have to deal with pressure. Sometimes it's minor like "do I go left or right at the roundabout?". Sometimes it's the difference between life and death. But how can we manage and work with that pressure, rather than against it? Dr Stephen Hearns is a critical care doctor and search and rescue specialist in Scotland, who has spent his career understanding what pressure is and how he can try to handle it in stressful times. His new book 'Peak performance under pressure' goes into detail about the tools and techniques we can all use to manage stress when the going gets tough. In this podcast, produced by eeast (East of England Ambulance Service) General Broadcast, Stephen talks about why pressure is sometimes good for us, how to recognise stress in other and what to do when you're maxed out.
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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.
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Content Article
WHO EMRO: Mental health and psychosocial stress
Patient Safety Learning posted an article in Mental health
During the COVID-19 pandemic, you might experience immense pressure and stressors. The World Health Organization has provided an infographic highlighting what stress is, how it might affect you and practical tips on what you can do. -
Content ArticleThe Queen’s Nursing Institute (QNI) has published a major new report on the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the UK’s nursing and residential homes.
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News ArticleWomen working in the NHS are suffering from serious stress and exhaustion in the wake of the coronavirus crisis, a troubling new report has found. Some 75% of NHS workers are women and the nursing sector is predominantly made up of women – with 9 out of 10 nurses in the UK being female. The report, conducted by the NHS Confederation’s Health and Care Women Leaders Network, warns the NHS is at risk of losing female staff due to them experiencing mental burnout during the global pandemic. Researchers, who polled more than 1,300 women working across health and care in England, found almost three quarters reported their job had a more damaging impact than usual on their emotional wellbeing due to the COVID-19 emergency. Read full story Source: The Independent, 25 August 2020
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News Article
Mental health leave for paramedics in England nearly triples since 2011
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
The number of paramedics taking time off with mental health conditions has almost tripled over the last decade, a Guardian analysis has found. In 2019, paramedics took 52,040 days off due to anxiety, stress, depression and other psychiatric illnesses, up from 18,184 in 2011 – an increase of 186%. While the overall number of paramedics has increased slightly over the period, the rate of mental health leave has increased more, resulting in the average number of days taken off per paramedic in a year rising from 2.8 to 5.8. Unison’s head of health, Sara Gorton, said: “Crisis-level staffing has increasingly become the norm within the NHS in recent years, even before the pandemic. Working long hours without breaks, in demanding conditions, it’s no wonder it’s taken a toll on the mental health of workers across the health service. And the coronavirus challenges have piled on more pressure.” Read full story Source: The Guardian, 23 July 2020 -
Content ArticleThis interview is part of the hub's 'Frontline insights during the pandemic' series where Martin Hogan interviews healthcare professionals from various specialties to capture their experience and insight during the coronavirus pandemic. Here Martin interviews a chief nurse of clinical productivity leading dynamic change within culture and governance. 15 years in the post, the chief nurse is responsible for leading improvement in standards of nursing and service.
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Content ArticleDr Donna Prosser interviews Dr. Albert Wu on the emotional support that we can provide to healthcare workers during this concerning time of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Content ArticleIn her latest blog, Sally Howard talks about psychological types and why understanding our preferences and how they differ to others, can be incredibly valuable. This knowledge can be used to strengthen teams, encouraging people to value diversity and work more effectively together. A particularly useful tool during these challenging times.
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Content ArticleHealthcare staff have had to adapt their way of working as a result of the pandemic, which has made pre-COVID guidance obsolete. Different Trusts are doing different things. Associate Director of Patient Safety Learning and Critical Care Outreach Nurse, Claire Cox, outlines the challenges and asks, what is the solution?
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Content Article
Guide on stress and secondary trauma for managers
Claire Cox posted an article in Workforce and resources
This guide, published by the Advancing Quality Alliance, has been developed to help managers support their staff and themselves with managing stress. It also highlights the potential issue of secondary trauma and is an introduction to this subject and part of a phased package that will cover both the crisis and recovery phase in meeting wellbeing needs of the workforce. -
Content ArticleStaff burnout was concern number 3 from ECRI’s Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns for 2019. This paper discusses staff burnout and the impact this can have on patient safety.
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Content ArticleThe rapid transmission of COVID-19 has resulted in an international pandemic with the cumulative death rate expected to further escalate in the months to come. The majority of deaths to date (May 2020) have been highly concentrated in certain geographic areas, placing tremendous stress on local healthcare systems and associated workforces. Healthcare is a fundamentally human endeavor; its reliability and the capacity to provide it are tested under stressful conditions and the COVID-19 pandemic is proving to be an especially difficult test for healthcare systems. Consideration of the humanness of care in the broader context of patient safety can raise awareness of how human weaknesses impact individual clinicians and care teams in ways that could degrade patient safety and quality of care and increase risk for both patients with COVID-19 and the staffs that care for them. These weaknesses are exacerbated by fatigue and burnout, absence of team trust, lack of time, medical illness, and poor psychological safety, each of which can result in reduced performance and contribute to failures such as misdiagnoses and adverse events. This article published on AHRQ's PSNet explores these weaknesses.
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Content ArticleWatch as Dr Donna Prosser is joined by a panel of experts to discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting mental health across the globe and share some tips for effectively managing these challenges.
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Content ArticleClinician well-being is known to play a role in error prevention. This perspective from Dzau et al., published in the New England Journal of Medicine, presents a five-part strategy comprised of organisational and national elements to ensure clinicians are situated to provide safe high-quality care during crisis, such as the coronavirus pandemic, and throughout the course of their careers.
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Content ArticleCOVID-19 brings an enormous set of challenges to hospitals around the world. One challenge in particular, the current mental state of healthcare workers, is now taking centre stage as clinicians face delivering difficult news to patients and their families about what is happening, what to expect, and how to prepare. ECRI and RLDatix came together to deliver a special webcast led by Dr Tim McDonald, an expert on Communication and Optimal Resolution (CANDOR). A recording of the webinar can be viewed below.
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Content ArticleIn this BMJ paper, Neil Greenberg and psychiatry colleagues set out measures that healthcare managers need to put in place to protect the mental health of healthcare staff having to make morally challenging decisions. The COVID-19 pandemic is likely to put healthcare professionals across the world in an unprecedented situation, having to make impossible decisions and work under extreme pressures. These decisions may include how to allocate scant resources to equally needy patients, how to balance their own physical and mental healthcare needs with those of patients, how to align their desire and duty to patients with those to family and friends, and how to provide care for all severely unwell patients with constrained or inadequate resources. This may cause some to experience moral injury or mental health problems.
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Content ArticlePresenteeism is linked to negative outcomes for patients, nurses, and healthcare organisations; however, we lack understanding of the relationships between nurse fatigue, burnout, psychological well-being, team vitality, presenteeism, and patient safety in nursing. In this study from Rainbow et al., the two aims were: (a) to examine the fit of a literature-derived model of the relationships between presenteeism, psychological health and well-being, fatigue, burnout, team vitality, and patient safety; and (b) to examine the role of presenteeism as a mediator between patient safety and the other model variables. The findings indicate that focusing on job-stress presenteeism may be relevant for this population and may offer additional insight into factors contributing to decreased nurse performance and the resulting risks to patient safety.
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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.
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News ArticlePregnancy support helplines are experiencing a massive spike in distressed pregnant women asking for urgent help as charities warn coronavirus upheaval is placing pregnant women at risk. Frontline service providers warn mothers-to-be are anxious about whether they will be denied pain relief options and be separated from their newborn babies due to them being put in neonatal units. Birthrights, a maternity care charity, found enquiries to its advice line in March were up by 464 per cent in comparison to March last year. Women getting in touch also raised concerns about home birth services being withdrawn, midwifery-led birth centres shutting their doors and elective caesareans being discontinued due to the COVID-19 crisis. Baby charity Tommy’s experienced a 71% surge in demand for advice from midwives on its pregnancy helpline last month. The organisation warned coronavirus turmoil is placing pregnant women at risk after their midwives answered 514 urgent calls for help in April which is a sizeable rise from the 300 enquiries they would generally get. Jane Brewin, the charity’s chief executive, said: “Antenatal care is vital for the wellbeing of mother and baby – but the coronavirus outbreak means that many don’t know who they can ask for help, or don’t want to bother our busy and beloved NHS." “Although services are adapting, they are still running, so pregnant women should not hesitate to raise concerns with their midwife and go to appointments when invited. The large increase in people contacting us demonstrates that coronavirus is creating extra confusion and anxiety for parents-to-be, making midwives’ expert advice and support even more important at this time.” Read full story Source: The Independent, 5 May 2020
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Content ArticleEmotional resilience has become a buzzword in the helping professions. Although resilience has been incorporated into the “official discourse” of social work, it is important to consider: • What does resilience mean? • To what extent do we as social workers need to be resilient? • Can resilience really protect our wellbeing and improve our professional practice? • Perhaps most importantly, how can we build our resilience to help us thrive in a profession that, although rewarding, can be very stressful? This evidence-based resource by Community Care Inform, aims to provide some guidance to help you navigate your professional journey. Based on their own research and that of others, they highlight the importance of emotional resilience in protecting your personal wellbeing and enhancing your professional practice and suggest ways to help you develop this important quality.
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Content Article
Moral Injury: Podcast
Claire Cox posted an article in Motivating staff
Dr Esther Murray is a Health Psychologist working at Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry. She has a keen interest in moral injury, the term used when people are witness to shocking or traumatic events that change their outlook on the world. In this podcast, from General Broadcast, the East England Ambulance Service Patient Safety Integration Lead talks to Esther about moral injury and how it can impact ambulance crews, as well as what we can all do to help each other.
