Mental Health for Healthcare Providers

What is Mental Health?
Healthcare Providers

Information provided here will:

  • Discuss adaptive ways healthcare providers might cope with their stress reactions.
  • Provide a brief, practical overview of psychological and psychiatric difficulties that healthcare providers might experience during these difficult times.
  • Provide an overview of simple pragmatic approaches that can be used to enhance mental health and well-being for healthcare providers.

What You Need to Know

Healthcare Providers

Efforts to Promote Resilience

In the first few months of 2020, several publications emerged which described initial efforts to provide support to healthcare providers to promote resilience and mental health stability. Some of these reports involved simple descriptions of the importance of mental health support in Wuhan, China or in Tehran, Iran. Two other reports provided descriptions of more integrated and comprehensive efforts to promote resilience, well-being, and mental health stability in healthcare workers.

Several key features in these mental health programs include:
  • A strong and decisive central committee or task force to promote mental health in the health system.
  • Strong leadership in the health system administration regarding personal safety for healthcare workers, along with support for other personal needs such as transportation, childcare, and proximal housing.
  • Immediate, transparent, and direct communications from the health system leadership about changes and updates in the status of the patient census, strategic planning, and outcomes.
  • Creation of a confidential and multi-level mental health support system offering a continuum of care (e.g. employee assistance program, spiritual care, psychological interventions, psychiatric services) as well as trainings in self-help techniques which may help workers to regulate their emotional responding.

Anxiety Among Healthcare Providers

Resilience in Stressful Events (RISE) is a training program that teaches you how to set up a peer-to-peer support program in your hospital and how to teach a multi-disciplinary team of hospital volunteers how to respond and support a team member involved in an unanticipated patient event, stressful situation, or patient-related injury.

The RISE Program is a Johns Hopkins resilience and mental health program for healthcare workers.

Mental Health Support for Health Care Workers
Healthcare Providers

Burnout

One might consider “stress” as pressure on an individual, and “burnout” as depletion. There can be a vicious cycle between the two. The World Health Organization’s Internation Disease Classification (ICD-11) has described burnout as a syndrome that results from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is not simply an individual issue, but a systems issue. Therefore, it is important that the healthcare organization has strong leadership with guiding principles and values, understands the needs of both staff and clients/patients and has timely and transparent two-way communication.

Healthcare Providers

Promoting Personal Well-Being and Mental Health

Maintaining psychological stability during the pandemic will often require healthcare workers to develop new skills and attitudes to maintain mental health under extreme stress. There are numerous ways that healthcare providers can develop such skills and attitudes, including completing simple educational programs, intentionally developing practical coping skills, completing a more intensive self-help program for healthcare providers, and finally, turning to mental health professionals for assistance.

Education and Awareness
Developing Coping Strategies
Self-Help Interventions
Seeking Behavioral Health Support
Healthcare Providers

Education and Awareness

This webpage provides ways that healthcare providers can expand their awareness of stress, coping, and mental health issues. Such educational interventions provide information to help understand our behavior and how to maintain good mental health. In addition to the information in this module, below you will find additional resources that are scientifically and clinically sound.

Healthcare Providers

Developing a Coping Strategy

For some people, maintaining good mental health is fairly straightforward. It is simply about trying to avoid situations and behaviors which make things worse and moving toward situations and behaviors which make things better. The internet is full of “dos and don’ts” regarding the pandemic, and undoubtedly some of these can be helpful. Below, we will provide a very simple list of behavioral strategies you can consider to promote your mental health. Not all of them will appeal to you, but pick the ones that do. Try and develop a simple behavioral routine that you follow each day to help you manage the stress of the pandemic. These skills will require practice and personal investment for them to be useful.

Checking my thinking
  • Problem solving is an instrumental coping mechanism that aims to locate the source of the problem and intentionally generating solutions that might help. This coping mechanism is often helpful in work situations.
  • Adjusting expectations includes anticipating a variety of outcomes to situations at work and tolerating frustration while still pursuing excellence.
  • Try to maintain the most helpful and adaptive thoughts. Try to gather as much information as possible to inform your thinking.
  • Stick with objective evidence (i.e., The odds are that the patient has the more common diagnosis rather that the more improbable one).
Choosing adaptive and helpful personal behaviors
  • Regular exercise, such as running, or team sports, is a good way to handle the stress of a given situation. This may involve yoga, meditating, progressive muscle relaxation, among other techniques of relaxation.
  • Get outdoors and enjoy nature or other activities.
  • Spend some time reading or reflecting on something other than television or computer screens.
Calming my body
  • Engage in relaxing activities, or practice calming techniques which can help to manage stress and improve overall coping.
  • Sit quietly with increased awareness of your surroundings can improve mood.
Managing my relationships effectively
  • Seek support and ask for help, or find emotional support from family members, friends, or work colleagues.
  • Avoid challenging conflictual relationships during high stress unless it is absolutely necessary.
  • Spend time with people who help you to feel better and more in control of your life.
Emotions
  • Humor. Pointing out the amusing aspects of the problem at hand, or "positive reframing," is thought to help deal with small failures.
  • Spend some time trying to think what you are feeling and experiencing. Give it a name. Try and understand what the feeling is about.
Healthcare Providers

Self-Help Interventions

Self-help treatment is a more intensive technique for helping healthcare providers promote well-being and resilience. This requires the individual engage in a more systematic and intensive behavioral training program to help manage stress and mental stability. There are many books and online programs that are available which meet these criteria.

The Worry Cure: Seven Steps to Stop Worry from Stopping You

Robert L. Leahy

A new, comprehensive approach to help you identify, challenge, and overcome all types of worry. This empowering seven-step program, includes practical, easy-to-follow advice and techniques.

Anxiety Free: Unravel Your Fears Before They Unravel You

Robert L. Leahy

Leahy looks at the origin of anxiety and teaches you how to outsmart your fears for a less stressful life. He lays out the symptoms associated with some of the most common anxiety disorders, including panic and agoraphobia, obsessive-compulsive, generalized anxiety, social anxiety, and post-traumatic stress and provides simple, step-by-step guides to help you overcome the fears associated with each of these.

Healthcare Toolbox

Center for Pediatric Traumatic Stress and the National Child Traumatic Stress Network

This toolbox is more comprehensive and systematic than simply practicing adaptive coping skills. It helps the healthcare provider to think about the way they are appraising work situations and examine their thoughts, feelings, and actions in their work setting. For motivated healthcare professionals, such an intervention can be very useful.

Healthcare Providers

Seeking Behavioral Health Supports

For some healthcare providers, seeking some level of professional support and guidance could be very useful. There are a range of different possibilities including visiting your health system’s employee assistance program, talking to a chaplain or spiritual advisor, or seeing a counselor, psychiatrist, or psychologist.

Making a decision to seek mental health care is personal and based on a variety of factors. Simply put, if you are experiencing significant personal distress or impairment in any of your roles in life, it is reasonable to consider seeking help.

In addition to a variety of services that might be available through your health system, consider viewing How You Can Gain Access to Mental Health Supports.

Healthcare Providers

Additional Free and Confidential Resources/Support for Providers

Physician Support Line

Psychiatrists Supporting Physicians.

Visit https://www.physiciansupportline.com/

Call 1(888)-409-0141

Free & Confidential

No appointment is necessary

Available 7 days a week

Dr. Mom Foundation

A Non Profit Committed to Supporting the Mental and Physical Health of Physcian Mothers

https://www.drmomfound.org/

Physicians Anonymous

Anonymous Support by Physicians and Life Coaches Based on the 12 Step Program Format of Anon Meetings

https://physiciansanonymous.org/

Physician Coach Support

https://physiciancoachsupport.com/


Modules describing signs and symptoms of behavioral health conditions are not diagnostic. If you have questions or concerns about your mental well-being, contact My Sanford Nurse at 701.234.5000, 1.800.821.5167, or click here to find a Sanford Health care professional. If you are having thoughts of self-harm, call the suicide prevention LIFELINE anytime at 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If this is an emergency, please call 911.

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