The psychological impact of the COVID emergency on Italian nursing homes staff and the effectiveness of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing

Elisa Faretta; Giada Maslovaric; M Ignazia Garau; Gabriella Marmondi; Laura Piras; Simona Rezzola; Alessia Incerti; Anna Nardoni; Marco Pagani; Eugenio Gallina

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2022.969028

The psychological impact of the COVID emergency on Italian nursing homes staff and the effectiveness of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing

Front Psychol. 2022 Oct 12:13:969028. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.969028. eCollection 2022.

Affiliations

¹ EMDR Italy Association, Varedo, Italy.
² Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Rome, Italy.
³ Centro di Ricerca e Studi in Psicotraumatologia, Milan, Italy.

Abstract

Residential nursing homes were particularly badly affected by the first wave of COVID-19, with large numbers of their frail person getting infected with COVID-19 and dying. The staff in these structures were catapulted into a reality very different from what they were used to. They had to adapt the way they used to take care of their patients in a very short space of time and in a scenario that was continually changing. In this manuscript we describe the subjective experience of staff in a number of Italian nursing homes during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic; and we report data showing the effectiveness of the Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) treatment provided to support them during this Pandemic.

Keywords: COVID-19; EMDR; Italy; PTSD; nursing home.