Health officials prepare for possible second wave

Hartford HealthCare highlights efforts to support doctors, health care workers

With a potential second wave of the coronavirus pandemic looming, Hartford HealthCare officials say supporting the mental health of physicians and health care workers remains a priority as some struggle with the aftermath of the virus’ initial impact.

Hartford HealthCare, with hospitals and offices across Connecticut, has been building a support system, knowing even before the pandemic that burnout was a tangible problem for its physicians, nurses and support staff.

About 25% of the U.S. health care workers experiences burnout about once or twice a year, said Dr. Sharon Kiely, Hartford HealthCare’s chief wellness officer. When you look at doctors, it’s about 35% to 55%, and among residents and students, it’s between 40% and 60%, she said.

Those statistics, Kiely said, reflect a time before COVID-19, which only worked to exacerbate what triggers burnout, from working long hours to feeling isolated from family, an acute problem for health care workers who feared they could infect those closest to them at home.

COVID-19 has also amplified a different problem: doctors’ sense of their ownabilities to help others.

“Doctors have something we call efficacy. You train for 20 years you feel very confident in your skills,” Kiely said Thursday. “The pandemic upended a lot of that. Early on, we didn’t know what was happening. There was a lot of misinformation. … we were learning as we went. There was a lot of support across the world to bring efficacy back.”

Thursday marked National Physician Suicide Awareness Day, an effort to shine light on an issue that’s underlined by stigma.

Kiely said research shows male doctors face a suicide rate 1.5 times that of the general population. With female physicians, its 2.4 times.

But studies also show that doctors do not necessarily share their struggles with others. While some turn to colleagues, friends and family, others remain silent.

“Overwhelmingly, doctors don’t tell anybody,” Kiely said.

Hartford HealthCare is pressing ahead with nurturing a network of support within its organization to help doctors who forged ahead against unknown challenges and were thrust into new roles to address the deadly pandemic.

The approach is done on three fronts: training, coping and social support. They are piloting programs in the hardest-hit units to give doctors the tools to help their colleagues in terms of psychological first aid.

Hartford HealthCare began offering a host of resources to help their employees manage issuses including burnout and the associated stress, anxiety and potential depression.

But social support remains bedrock to their strategies. They built a physician peer hotline, staffed by volunteer doctors. Late in the summer a similar hotline was launched for nurses, Kiely said.

“We’ve touched over 4,000 people with these programs during COVID. It’s been really remarkable how people reached out,” she said.

The aim, she said, is to build resiliency, both on a personal level and as an institution, as a potential second wave of the pandemic may yet arrive this fall.