A psychological health support scheme for medical teams in COVID-19 outbreak and its effectiveness

Wenhong Cheng; Fang Zhang; Zhen Liu; Hao Zhang; Yifan Lyu; Hao Xu; Yingqi Hua; Jiarong Gu; Zhi Yang; Jun Liu

doi:10.1136/gpsych-2020-100288

A psychological health support scheme for medical teams in COVID-19 outbreak and its effectiveness

Gen Psychiatr. 2020 Aug 30;33(5):e100288. doi: 10.1136/gpsych-2020-100288. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Wenhong Cheng^#¹, Fang Zhang^#², Zhen Liu³, Hao Zhang², Yifan Lyu², Hao Xu⁴, Yingqi Hua⁵, Jiarong Gu⁶, Zhi Yang^{7

8}, Jun Liu⁹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Psychiatry, Shanghai Mental Health Center, Shanghai General Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, China.
² Department of Psychiatry, Shanghai General Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, China.
³ Department of Psychiatry, Shanghai Mental Health Center, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, China.
⁴ Department of Cardiology, Shanghai General Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, China.
⁵ Department of Scientific Research Administration, Shanghai General Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, China.
⁶ Department of Administration, Shanghai General Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, China.
⁷ Laboratory of Psychological Health and Imaging, Shanghai Mental Health Center, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, China.
⁸ Institute of Psychological and Behavioral Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China.
⁹ Department of Nephrology, Shanghai General Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, China.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

Background: Medical staff 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 medical team is essential for efficient functioning, but psychological intervention models for emergency medical teams are rare.

Aims: To design a systematic, full-coverage psychological health support scheme for medical teams 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 medical staff by promoting their strengths.

Results: The scheme economically supported a special medical team of 156 members with only one onsite psychiatrist. Our data reflected that the entire medical team 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 medical teams. This scheme could be applied to medical teams dealing with emergent situations.

Keywords: crisis intervention; global burden of disease; psychology, medical.