Clinics (Sao Paulo). 2020;75:e1963.
How Institutions Can Protect the Mental Health and Psychosocial Well-Being of Their Healthcare Workers in the Current COVID-19 Pandemic
Pedro Fukuti, Caroline Louise Mesquita Uchôa, Marina Flaborea Mazzoco
, Felipe Corchs
, Carla Satie Kamitsuji, Luciane De Rossi, Izabel Cristina Rios, Selma Lancman, Eloisa Bonfa, Tarcisio Eloy Pessoa de Barros-Filho
, Eurípedes Constantino Miguel
DOI: 10.6061/clinics/2020/e1963
When the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared the spread of the severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) a global pandemic on March 11, 2020, there were approximately 147,000 confirmed cases worldwide. Just one month later, the COVID-19 disease had spread dramatically; the number of cases had increased ten-fold (), with 15% of infected patients requiring hospitalization and 5% in intensive care units (). This meteoric rise in cases resulted in an overloaded demand for medical resources, often exceeding the available resources of healthcare systems around the world.
Although we often conceive of healthcare systems in terms of the physical hospital beds and medical equipment, the system’s most fundamental, valuable, and vulnerable assets are, undoubtedly, its manpower resources. Medical doctors, nurses, physiotherapists, technicians, and countless other professionals must all come together for the system to work effectively. Indeed, in order to buffer the effect of the pandemic on our healthcare systems and society as a whole, we rely heavily on the extent to which these individuals can function in a cohesive, effective manner ().
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