Helping healthcare workers to cope with stress

A group of mental health experts, led by UCL, have issued advice for frontline healthcare workers on how to cope with stress during the COVID-19 crisis. The advice, launched today in a video, has been issued alongside new guidelines for people in the health sector who are managing responses to stress experienced by hospital staff, covering what is known and not about the psychological effects of COVID-19 on healthcare workers. The materials have been developed by the COVID Trauma Response Working Group, which comprises psychological trauma specialists, coordinators of psychosocial responses to trauma, and NHS wellbeing leads, and is coordinated by staff at UCL and the Traumatic Stress Clinic at Camden and Islington NHS Foundation Trust. The group has been formed to help coordinate trauma-informed responses to the COVID-19 outbreak. Dr Michael Bloomfield (UCL Psychiatry and Camden and Islington NHS Foundation Trust), an academic and consultant psychiatrist who convened the group, said: "Health professionals across the world are doing really important and difficult work, and it's only to be expected that many understandably will feel anxious, stressed, overwhelmed, guilty, helpless, angry or even numb." "We're very concerned about the health and well-being of our frontline colleagues in the NHS and all over the world. We know that they are facing many stresses including concerns about their own safety at work. We want them to know that they are not alone.