Article Review: COVID-19 and the Mental Health Impact Upon Healthcare Workers
Americans lauded healthcare workers as the nations heroes during the height of the pandemic. But, just like other Americans, healthcare workers too were also personally and intimately affected by the impact of COVID-19. They had to deal with the overwhelming experience of dealing with stress, sickness, and death daily, in a manner which many of them were unprepared for before the crisis. Hall & Powers (2022) remind the reader in their article Addressing the mental health impact of the COVID pandemic on healthcare workers, America is now facing three years of the pandemic, and years of medical misinformation, death, and frustrations with the seemingly endless waves of infection and reinfection.
Healthcare workers face greater physical risk from infectious illness, and also a psychological toll from frustration and a sense of helplessness, both when patients pass away, and also resistance to accepting vaccination and the medical facts of what is known about COVID-19. At the beginning of the pandemic, workers suffered from a chronic lack of personal protective equipment (PPE), adequate ways of treating the illness, and still are critically overburdened with the responsibilities of providing care. Even before COVID-19 was a factor, burnout rates...
…alike. It also discourages new
employees from entering the profession.
The healthcare profession, the article stresses, much take responsibility for the structural and intrinsic factors that contribute to burnout. Institutions must put controls into place to increase levels of staffing, offer time for workers to decompress from long workdays, and offer mental and spiritual counseling to ensure that workers do not blame themselves. Reducing the risk of patients verbally lashing out at workers and horizontal violence from even other stressed out healthcare workers is an imperative. The authors cite the value of a hospital-based chaplaincy who are equipped to offer spiritual care to healthcare workers, not just…
