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The mental health of NHS staff during the COVID-19 pandemic: two-wave Scottish cohort study
- Johannes H. De Kock, Helen Ann Latham, Richard G. Cowden, Breda Cullen, Katia Narzisi, Shaun Jerdan, Sarah-Anne Muñoz, Stephen J. Leslie, Neil McNamara, Adam Boggon, Roger W. Humphry
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- Journal:
- BJPsych Open / Volume 8 / Issue 1 / January 2022
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 07 January 2022, e23
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- Article
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- Open access
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Background
Health and social care workers (HSCWs) are at risk of experiencing adverse mental health outcomes (e.g. higher levels of anxiety and depression) because of the COVID-19 pandemic. This can have a detrimental effect on quality of care, the national response to the pandemic and its aftermath.
AimsA longitudinal design provided follow-up evidence on the mental health (changes in prevalence of disease over time) of NHS staff working at a remote health board in Scotland during the COVID-19 pandemic, and investigated the determinants of mental health outcomes over time.
MethodA two-wave longitudinal study was conducted from July to September 2020. Participants self-reported levels of depression (Patient Health Questionnaire-9), anxiety (Generalised Anxiety Disorder-7) and mental well-being (Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale) at baseline and 1.5 months later.
ResultsThe analytic sample of 169 participants, working in community (43%) and hospital (44%) settings, reported substantial levels of depression and anxiety, and low mental well-being at baseline (depression, 30.8%; anxiety, 20.1%; well-being, 31.9%). Although mental health remained mostly constant over time, the proportion of participants meeting the threshold for anxiety increased to 27.2% at follow-up. Multivariable modelling indicated that working with, and disruption because of, COVID-19 were associated with adverse mental health changes over time.
ConclusionsHSCWs working in a remote area with low COVID-19 prevalence reported substantial levels of anxiety and depression, similar to those working in areas with high COVID-19 prevalence. Efforts to support HSCW mental health must remain a priority, and should minimise the adverse effects of working with, and disruption caused by, the COVID-19 pandemic.
Contextualising the ‘ethics boom
- Edited by Iain Ferguson, University of New South Wales, Michael Lavalette
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- Book:
- Critical and Radical Debates in Social Work
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 04 February 2022
- Print publication:
- 12 March 2014, pp 382-386
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Summary
We have found no way to replace capitalism as an effective mode of production, and yet that capitalist society as it actually functions violates all conceptions of a rational moral order. (Alistair MacIntyre, 1979, cited in Blackledge, 2012, p 1)
Sarah Banks has, in the lead article, clearly and concisely set out the challenges facing social work, which are a consequence of the dominance of new public management (NPM) in public services in the UK. My response is concerned with trying to contextualise this and spell out the challenges further, which may be in some senses more profound than Sarah suggests in terms of defending social work as an ethical enterprise.
Sarah outlines the way NPM originated under the Conservatives in the 1990s, but also notes the way that this was hugely expanded under New Labour. The result of this was that NPM was given a legitimacy it never could have had when it was primarily identified with a Thatcherite politics. In a sense the New Labour ‘modernisation’ project, rather than representing a return to, or even a modernisation of, the principles of the welfare state, was a continuation of a free market, neoliberal ‘common sense’, albeit with greater state funding. Stuart Hall has recently made the point that ‘New Labour came closer to institutionalising neo-liberalism as a social and political form than Thatcher did’, particularly as Tony Blair's language found ways making these ideas acceptable ‘to Labour voters as well’ (Derbyshire, 2012).
Sarah's discussion includes the example of the way agencies were expected to target scarce resources to those who ‘need them most’. The use of this approach by New Labour effectively shifted the discourse of welfare away from a universalist conception, one of the primary achievements of the post-war welfare state, and thus opened the way to a much more punitive and controlling conception of welfare. These practices have already had a massive impact on social work practice, particularly in the area of children and families, which is now hugely stigmatised, and of course this process has been aided and abetted by the reactionary Murdoch press.