Psychological Health Support Programme

Background
Medicalstaff fighting the COVID-19 pandemic are experiencing stress from high occupational risk, panic in the community and the extreme workload. Maintaining the psychological health of a Medicalteam is essential for efficient functioning, but psychological intervention models for emergency Medicalteams are rare.
Aims
To design a systematic, full-coverage psychological health support scheme for Medicalteams serving large-scale emergent situations, and demonstrate its effectiveness in a real-world study in Leishenshan Hospital during the COVID-19 epidemic in Wuhan, China.
Methods
The scheme integrates onsite and online mental health resources and features team-based psychosocial support and evidence-based interventions. It contained five modules, including a daily measurement of mood, a daily mood broadcast that promotes positive affirmation, a daily online peer-group activity with themes based on the challenges reported by the team, Balint groups and an after-work support team. The daily mood measurement provides information to the other modules. The scheme also respects the special psychological characteristics of Medicalstaff by promoting their strengths.
Results
The scheme economically supported a special Medicalteam of 156 members with only one onsite psychiatrist. Our data reflected that the entire Medicalteam maintained an overall positive outlook (7–9 out of 10 in a Daily Mood Index, DMI) for nearly 6 weeks of continuous working. Since the scheme promoted self-strengths and positive self-affirmation, the number of self-reports of life-related gains were high and played a significant effect on the DMI. Our follow-up investigations also revealed that multiple modules of the scheme received high attention and evaluation levels.
Conclusion
Our quantitative data from Leishenshan hospital, Wuhan, China, show that the programme is adequate to support the continuous high workload of Medicalteams. This scheme could be applied to Medicalteams dealing with emergent situations.

Rank: 102

First Author: Cheng

Outcome: Intervention Experience,Affect

Outcome p-value: Intervention Experience:●, Affect:⭑⭑⭑

Intervention Category: Organizational and System-Level,Peer Support

Time per Employee (hours): No time specified.

D&B Study Quality Rating: 10

Reviewer Confidence: 2

Country: China

Study Design Type: Quasi-experimental

Materials Available to Implement: Intervention outlined in publication. Corresponding authors: liujun-sgh@sjtu.edu.cn and yangz@smhc.org.cn.

Organiz./Individ. Focus: Individual

Prevention Category: Secondary

Effect Size: Large

Effect size Small:

Effect size Medium:

Effect size Large: Affect

Reference: Cheng, W., Zhang, F., Liu, Z., Zhang, H., Lyu, Y., Xu, H., Hua, Y., Gu, J., Yang, Z., & Liu, J. (2020). A psychological health support scheme for Medicalteams in COVID-19 outbreak and its effectiveness. General Psychiatry, 33(5), e100288. https://doi.org/10.1136/gpsych-2020-100288