What support do frontline workers want? A qualitative study of health and social care workers’ experiences and views of psychosocial support during the COVID-19 pandemic
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Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has placed a significant burden on the mental health and wellbeing of frontline health and social care workers. The need to support frontline staff has been recognised. However, there is to date little research specifically on how best to support the mental health needs of frontline workers, and none on their own experiences and views about what might be most helpful.
Aims
We set out to redress this research gap by qualitatively exploring UK frontline health and social care workers’ own experiences and views of psychosocial support during the pandemic.
Method
Frontline health and social care workers were recruited purposively through social media and by snowball sampling via healthcare colleagues. Workers who volunteered to take part in the study were interviewed remotely following a semi-structured interview guide. Transcripts of the interviews were analysed by the research team following the principles of Reflexive Thematic Analysis.
Results
We conducted 25 interviews with frontline workers from a variety of professional groups working in health and social care settings across the UK. Themes derived from our analysis showed that workers’ experiences and views about psychosocial support were complex. Peer support was many workers’ first line of support but could also be experienced as a burden. Workers were ambivalent about support shown by organisations, media and the public. Whilst workers valued psychological support services, there were many disparities in provision and barriers to access.
Conclusions
The results of this study show that frontline health and social care workers are likely to need a flexible system of support including peer, organisational and professional support. More research is needed to fully unpack the structural, systemic and individual barriers to accessing psychosocial support. Greater collaboration, consultation and co-production of support services and their evaluation is warranted.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.11.05.20226522: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement IRB: Study design, participants, and procedures: All procedures were approved by the University College London Research Ethics Committee (Ref. 18341/001).
Consent: As all interviews took place remotely, participants were asked to return the electronically signed consent form to the allocated interviewer in advance of the interview.Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable It is worth noting that all the interviewers who conducted the interviews are female. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.11.05.20226522: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement IRB: Study design, participants, and procedures: All procedures were approved by the University College London Research Ethics Committee (Ref. 18341/001).
Consent: As all interviews took place remotely, participants were asked to return the electronically signed consent form to the allocated interviewer in advance of the interview.Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable It is worth noting that all the interviewers who conducted the interviews are female. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:However, there were several caveats to this, and peer support was certainly not straightforward. Staff often did not attend to the state of their own, and their colleagues’, mental health, indicative of a lack of awareness of mental health issues in some physical healthcare settings. Mental health awareness training could facilitate better recognition and prioritisation of their own and others’ psychological wellbeing and has a demonstrable impact on improving healthcare worker wellbeing and burnout [15]. Greenberg and Tracy [16] have advocated for supervisors to be trained in having “psychologically savvy conversations”. This could certainly go some way to mitigating the lack of awareness of mental health issues in the health and social care workforce. However, the workers in this sample talked rarely about supervisors and managers as sources of support. Several also talked about deliberately wanting to access support that was outside of their line management structure. We cannot assume that this means supervisors are not important, but nor does it mean that we can assume that they are. It may therefore be equally, or even more important, for mental health awareness training to be made available to all staff. Furthermore, awareness of mental health issues alone is unlikely to lead to behaviour change and several participants in this study spoke about enduring stigma associated with transparency around mental health difficulties. Stigma about mental illness amongst healthcare...
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
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