Lessons Learnt from Psychological impact of Covid-19 on healthcare workers
According to Karbarkapa et al. (2020), healthcare workers ask their management and employers to be heard, protected, prepared, supported, and cared for by the employer. These five things are essential facts that we learn from the psychological impact of Covid-19 on healthcare workers. The call for help indicates that employers must constantly be reminded to provide early support that will safeguard the psychological stability of healthcare workers. The call to be prepared indicates their thirst for knowledge to deal with any novel outbreak. They were pushed into the raging fires with only their scalpels in their hands without prior knowledge of the pandemic, making them hard to cope. This led many healthcare workers to be the victims and fatality toll of Covid-19. The call to be protected indicates the despair and desperate situation of the healthcare workers. They were only reminded to sacrifice their lives to save the lives of others in the hospital. It was a demanding case despite being referred to as heroes at the time of the quest.
Another aspect learned from the study is that the higher incidence of COVID-19’s psychological effects on healthcare professionals warrants more consideration of this subgroup’s educational and policy treatments. Various authors have argued for behavioral and educational therapies emphasizing resiliency, positive thinking, social support, consistency, and other factors.
The results of various researchers show that psychological therapies must be developed to support post-traumatic development in healthcare workers. It is estimated that stress prevalence has significant ramifications for creating an intervention at a suitable time to deal with emerging PTSD at its initial stage, which might be helpful in the pandemic’s healing stages. Mental health remedies for healthcare workers and their well-being is pioneered by most of the researchers, including teaching coping mechanisms, engaging social wellness actions in the community, encouraging every effort of the healthcare workers, and opening lines of communication for help with the advent of depression and work pressure at crucial times to conserve the energy of the worker.
Future mitigations
Every department and field needs future emergency crisis planning, and medical professionals should do the same. Employers should care for those they are leading and make organizational strategies for staff well-being, consistent communication, and significant team support for the healthcare workforce to perform to their full potential over an extended period. Individual resiliency will be promoted in such a setting, and self-compassion and self-care will be encouraged. Once the immediate threat of COVID-19 has passed, various organizations and institutions should focus on developing an organizational culture of resilience that will help lessen the possibility of psychological torture and impact on healthcare workers and create a weekly routine to check on the condition of these workers.
To sustain an organizational culturally resilient environment, socio-psychological assistance should concentrate on organizational and personal traits. Previous outbreaks have shown that the organizational setting has a significant impact on the psychological consequences for healthcare workers and the entire workforce’s productivity framework. It is understood that organizational culture beliefs, leadership philosophies, and management interaction approaches play a significant role in employee stress management. Employee-to-employee communication and assistance in establishing instructions and safety precautions help lessen the possibilities of emotional discomfort in outbreak conditions. Socially attributed assistance and support groups may also help to reduce stress. Still, because of their busy schedules or worries about spreading the illness they are exposed to on the job, healthcare workers frequently neglect their friendships and family ties. Maintaining social interactions is becoming more complex, given the need for social distancing. There are detailed sections about healthcare employees suffering from harassment and social stigma due to public concern over catching the pandemic from individuals who have had the most exposure.
References
Son, H., Lee, W. J., Kim, H. S., Lee, K. S., & You, M. (2019). Hospital workers’ psychological resilience after the 2015 Middle East respiratory syndrome outbreak. Social Behavior and Personality: an international journal, 47(2), 1-13.