Study: Mental health professionals supporting front-line health and social care workers during COVID

The COVID-19 pandemic is having a well-documented impact on the mental health of front-line health and social care workers (HSCWs). However, little attention has been paid to the experiences of, and impact on, the mental health professionals who were rapidly tasked with supporting them.

A new study, published in BJPsych Open and led by UCL Psychiatry Clinical Associate Professor Jo Billings, co-director of the COVID Trauma Research Working Group, and a team of UCL MSc students and graduates, set out to redress this gap by qualitatively exploring UK mental health professionals’ experiences, views and needs.

The researchers interviewed 28 mental health professionals from varied professional backgrounds, career stages and settings across the UK. They found mental health professionals were motivated and driven to develop new clinical pathways to support HSCWs they perceived as colleagues and many experienced professional growth. However, this came at some costs, as they took on additional responsibilities and increased workloads. Many were professionally isolated and were affected vicariously by the traumas and moral injuries that healthcare workers talked about in sessions.

They also reported feeling uncertain and anxious in the early stages of the pandemic as there was no established evidence base for supporting health and social care staff, and many of the mental health professionals were redeployed into new roles and physical healthcare contexts in which they had little or no previous experience.

Dr Billings said: “We were expecting mental health professionals to have risen to the challenge of supporting their physical health and social care colleagues and were not surprised to hear about the sacrifices they had made to their own wellbeing in order to rapidly develop new clinical pathways and make themselves available to provide support. We were surprised by how much mental health professionals had not considered the impact of this work on their own mental health and wellbeing, and indeed many of our participants commented on this being something they had not really thought about until we asked them about it!”

“Since we have shared the results of this study, many mental health professionals have fed back that the findings of this study have resonated with them and that it has raised awareness of the urgent need to provide more support for mental health workers.”

Given the findings, Dr Billings recommends that wellbeing support for mental health professionals be prioritised, frequently monitored and integrated into regular support structure, including supervision and supervision of supervision. Training in the work context and needs of HSCWs, as a high-risk occupational group, should be included in mental health professionals’ training, she added.

Dr Billings said her group will continue to follow the journeys of mental health professionals as they evolve services to support health and social care workers and the ongoing impact on them from doing this.

Links:

• UCL Division of  Psychiatry
• Dr Jo Billings
• BJPsych Open publication  
• COVID Trauma Research Working Group