(The Lancet) — The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged and, in many cases, exceeded the capacity of hospitals and intensive care units (ICUs) worldwide. Health-care workers have continued to provide care for patients despite exhaustion, personal risk of infection, fear of transmission to family members, illness or death of friends and colleagues, and the loss of many patients.
Sadly, health-care workers have also faced many additional—often avoidable—sources of stress and anxiety, and long shifts combined with unprecedented population restrictions, including personal isolation, have affected individuals’ ability to cope.
As the pandemic unfolded, many health-care workers travelled to new places of work to provide patient care in overwhelmed facilities; those who volunteered in unfamiliar clinical areas were often launched into the pandemic ICU setting with insufficient skills and training. The burden of training and supervising these volunteers fell on already stressed clinicians.
Hospital-based health professionals worked long hours wearing cumbersome and uncomfortable personal protective equipment (PPE), after initial shortages of PPE had been addressed. They strived to keep up with emerging knowledge, institutional and regional procedures, and changing PPE recommendations, while trying to distinguish accurate information from misinformation. Health-care workers had to adopt new technologies to fulfil patient care and educational responsibilities, including the provision of telemedicine. (…)