Each increase in COVID-19 poses a risk to health care workers: PTSD

September 5 (Reuters) – Nurse Chris Prott’s knees jump, his heart pounding, his mouth dries and his mind sinks when he talks about working in the intensive care unit (ICU) of the Milwaukee VA Medical Center during pandemic surges.

Prott shares a common struggle for many of the military veterans he has cared for for years: symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Prott was among a dozen members of the ICU who told Reuters symptoms such as waking up from nightmares bathed in sweat; flashbacks to dying patients during the first fearful days of the pandemic; burning anger; and panic at the sound of medical alarms. Those whose symptoms last more than a month and are severe enough to interfere with daily life can be diagnosed with PTSD.

Delta’s growing variant is accumulating new traumas as the United States and other nations begin to study PTSD in health care workers. The data already showed that U.S. health care workers were in crisis before COVID-19.

Although PTSD is related to combat, it can arise among civilians after natural disasters, abuse, or other trauma. Healthcare workers may be reluctant to equate their experience with that of returning soldiers.

“I feel like a fool calling him PTSD,” Prott said. “It was very hard for me to talk to someone because I see guys with real PTSD. What I have, it’s nothing compared to it, so you feel guilty thinking about it.”

The psychiatrist Dr. Bessel van der Kolk knows this best.

“On the surface, a nurse at your local hospital will not look like a boy returning from Afghanistan,” said the author of “The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.” “But underneath it all, we have these basic functions determined by neurobiology that are the same.”

Pre-pandemic studies showed that PTSD rates in front-line health workers ranged from 10% to 50%. The suicide rate among physicians was more than double that of the general public.

The American Medical Association (AMA) has approved a military psychologist and the National Center for PTSD from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to help measure the impact of the pandemic.

Dr. Huseyin Bayazit, a psychiatric resident at the Center for Health Sciences at Texas Tech University, and researchers from his native Turkey surveyed 1,833 Turkish health workers last fall. The results, presented in May at a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, showed a PTSD rate of 49.5% among non-physicians and 36% for physicians. Suicide thinking rates increased as workers spent more time in COVID-19 units.

The unions want to mitigate trauma by establishing national rules on the number of patients under the care of each nurse. Workers say they should not pay for therapy, medication and other interventions.

The AMA and other groups want more confidentiality for doctors seeking mental health services. Most of the ICU staff who discussed PTSD with Reuters asked for anonymity for fear of repercussions at work.

New York’s Mount Sinai Health System and Chicago’s Rush University Health System offer confidential, free mental health services.

Mount Sinai’s new Stress, Resilience, and Personal Growth Center offers a military-inspired “Battle Buddies” peer-to-peer assistance program. A chaplain on Rush’s “Road Home” program for veterans leads a “post-traumatic growth” mourning support group for UCI nurses.

The VA system provides short-term, free mental health counseling through its employee assistance program. Many local VA facilities complement those with spiritual counseling and crisis incident response teams, a spokesman said.

“WE HAVE TO TREAT IT”

About 5,000 American doctors quit smoking every two years due to exhaustion, said Dr. Christine Sinsky, vice president of the AMA. The annual cost is about $ 4.6 billion, including loss of vacancy income and hiring expenses, he said.

The results of hospital surveys in March led the Department of Health and Human Services to warn that “staff shortages have affected patient care and that exhaustion and trauma have affected staff mental health.”

The traumatic surgeon, Dra. Kari Jerge, volunteered to work in the COVID-19 room in Phoenix during last winter’s wave. He declined substantially more salaries to return to the ICU after the Delta variant increase.

Jerge encourages others to prioritize “self-preservation,” but worries about loss of consciousness. “There is infinite value in a nurse who works in the ICU for 20 years and has a gut feeling when something goes wrong with a patient,” she said.

Nurse Pascaline Muhindura, 40, who cares for COVID-19 patients in Kansas City, Missouri, has defended the safety of health care workers since she lost a co-worker to the disease at the start of the pandemic.

“It’s getting worse. We’re going back to this place, which aroused those emotions again,” said Muhindura, who added that many employers do not offer adequate insurance coverage for therapy.

An ICU encourages the kind of camaraderie forged in battle. A group of Southern California COVID-19 nurses had matching tattoos. Health workers pledge to cry at home after difficult changes, support each other on social media, and push colleagues to seek help.

“There’s nothing wrong with feeling that way,” VA nurse Prott said. “However, we have to face it.”

Report by Lisa Baertlein in Los Angeles Edited by Donna Bryson and Bill Berkrot

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