Responding to the Psychological Needs of Health Workers During Pandemic: Ten Lessons From Humanitarian Work

When a complex emergency (CE) overwhelms infrastructure, the ability of health-care providers to work efficiently under duress saves lives. The author uses her experience of providing mental health supports to humanitarian aid workers and the pieces of training conducted for internal medicine practitioners to offer guidance on how to manage severe job-related stresses during the response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. This work reminds responders about their professional mission and purpose, but its extreme physical and mental demands can take a toll on their well-being and health. In CEs, the sheer volume of work and the emotional over-engagement tend to produce toxic fantasies (eg, rescuer or helper fantasies), acting upon which threatens integrity of care and increases risks for both patients and providers. Accumulated fatigue and exposure to mass suffering and mortality can change the perceived value of life and increase reckless, risk-taking, and suicidal behaviors. Introducing a self-awareness framework prioritizes the awareness of the available choices and making situation-appropriate and informed decisions about balancing one’s own and others’ needs. The COVID-19 response has demonstrated that fostering peer supports, changing organizational culture, addressing self-awareness within a training and supervisory context, and strengthening supports for managers are important parts of disaster preparedness. It also revealed that more research is needed to better understand and meet the special psychological needs of health-care responders.