The RCPsych Article of the Month for September is ‘Let us do better: learning lessons for recovery of healthcare professionals during and after COVID-19‘ and the blog is written by author Esther Murray and Professor Richard Williams published in BJPsych Open.

Having carried out research and delivered interventions to help healthcare professionals manage their mental health for some years before the COVID-19 pandemic, when it finally came, I was well-positioned to be able to help. Except that I wasn’t!

The nature of the disaster, this time, was an infectious disease to which I was particularly vulnerable, and which had unknown long-term effects and a high mortality rate. At the time, in spring 2020, there was not much to do but be a desk-based source of support in helping others to manage some of the psychosocial impacts of COVID-19.  I know I am far from being the only healthcare professional or allied healthcare professional who had to stay at home and shout encouragement from the side-lines.  

When I carried out a literature search on the psychological effects of pandemics on healthcare staff, it became clear that we already knew a lot about how staff might be affected but we didn’t seem to have plans in place to help them. Pandemics aren’t really so uncommon; we just haven’t been hit so hard in Europe and North America for a while. The desire to write the article came out of the desire to challenge policymakers, senior managers, and anyone with any influence on policy in the NHS to learn from COVID-19 and other pandemics to make some changes that would benefit staff.

One of the things my colleagues and I wanted to focus on in this paper was taking time to think through what has happened, what we already knew, what we know now and how we can turn that into action.  We witnessed huge numbers of staff of the NHS in the UK accepting risks to their own health, working extremely hard and becoming progressively more fatigued as the COVID-19 pandemic ran its course through the first and second waves. Now, in the third wave, the pressures on staff are rising again but this time they are not tempered by observable levels of public solidarity and support as they were in the first wave.

It’s incumbent on us now to sift carefully through all the information we have gleaned so that we learn from all the hard work that has been undertaken. We hope that this narrative review propels policymakers, service designers and everyone in healthcare to learn the importance of supporting each other in order to deliver great services for the public in tough times and also when delivering more routine care.

The COVID-19 pandemic persists with concomitant increased stress on healthcare workers and healthcare systems due to rising new cases and hospitalizations amid the delta variant.  What have we learned from prior infectious outbreaks and during this pandemic?  What has been done to address pre-existing NHS issues pre-COVID and during this pandemic? The BJPsych Open article of the month resonates on these issues – “Let us do better: learning lessons for recovery of healthcare professionals during and after COVID-19.”  This article should have a longstanding impact on NHS healthcare policy.

Dr. Esther Murray and colleagues strike an important chord when stating “Despite all we have learned from prior disasters and infectious outbreaks, the COVID-19 pandemic makes us focus again on the need to rethink and restructure the healthcare culture in the NHS to ensure the long-term well-being of healthcare providers.”  The need to understand and appropriately moderate primary and secondary stressors is addressed as is the concept of maximizing healthcare worker and healthcare system wellbeing.

The authors conclude that “There is much that has been and is being done to care for staff during the pandemic, and much of that should be adapted and taken into healthcare systems after the crisis passes.”  BJPsych Open looks forward to annual updates from these authors to assess what was really learned from the COVID-19 pandemic and put into lasting practice.

Ken Kaufman, 

BJPsych Open Editor in Chief