scholarly journals The Globalization of an Interaction Ritual Chain: “Clapping for Carers” During the Conflict Against COVID-19

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandre Rigal ◽  
David Joseph-Goteiner
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Distress ◽  
Healthcare Workers ◽  
World Society ◽  
Focused Attention ◽  
Global Cities ◽  
Theoretical Possibility ◽  
Substantial Evidence ◽  
Social Distancing ◽  
Interaction Ritual ◽  
Interaction Rituals

Abstract Sociologists have long been interested in the theoretical possibility of a universal ritual. Despite a growing number of indicators of world society and globalization, there have not been attempts to observe and analyze the international reach of particular rituals. We propose an extension of the “interaction ritual chain” by theorizing how an interaction ritual might be created and diffused internationally. We look at the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, which created shared conditions of social distancing and emotional distress. We analyze a discontinuous chain of urban and national interaction rituals that focused attention on the efforts of healthcare workers fighting the virus. We count clapping and noise-making in 101 countries and 26 global cities. While we find similar ritual forms and international symbols of solidarity, there was also substantial evidence of conflict and particularism.

Psychosocial Impact of Covid-19 Pandemic on Frontline Healthcare Workers in Pakistan: A Cross-Sectional Study

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Quratul-Ain Zafar
Keyword(s):  
Data Collection ◽  
Emotional Distress ◽  
Healthcare Workers ◽  
Cross Sectional Study ◽  
Psychosocial Impact ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Study Group ◽  
Sectional Study ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Frontline Healthcare Workers

Objective: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on frontline healthcare workers in Pakistan in terms of psychological factors emotional distress, insomnia, and burnout. Study Design: Observational cross-sectional study. Place and Duration of Study: This study was conducted at different hospitals across Pakistan and data collection was carried out from 15th June 2020 till 15th August 2020. Material and Methods: This was a questionnaire-based study aiming to compare the levels of burnout and emotional distress between frontline COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 healthcare workers. Any physician, nurse, and other healthcare workers were recruited from emergency care units and Covid-19 care units (target group), and non-COVID-19 care units (control group). Participation was voluntary and participants had to complete self-reported questionnaires and scales. A mixed-mode data collection was carried out, either in paper or web-based form to ensure maximum participation. Results: The independent t-test showed a statistically significant difference between the two groups regarding depression, stress, and insomnia. The study group showed higher scores for these factors than the control group. Chi-square test of association revealed significant scores of burnout and professional fulfillment in both groups. There was a higher prevalence of burnout in the study group than in the control group. Conclusion: This study concludes that there was a significant psychosocial impact of the Covid-19 pandemic in the frontline healthcare workers measured in terms of emotional distress, insomnia, and burnout.

scholarly journals Promoting resilience in healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic with a brief online intervention

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole R DeTore ◽  
Louisa Sylvia ◽  
Elyse R Park ◽  
Anne Burke ◽  
Julie H Levison ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Distress ◽  
Healthcare Workers ◽  
Online Intervention ◽  
Psychological Wellbeing ◽  
Online Course ◽  
Baseline Survey ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
Emotional Resilience ◽  
Self Compassion ◽  
Resilience Training

Introduction: The psychological wellbeing of healthcare workers has been impacted by the high levels of stress many have experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aimed to examine the feasibility and acceptability of a brief online course focused on introducing skills that could increase resilience and decreases emotional distress in healthcare workers during the pandemic. Materials and Methods: Employees of a large healthcare system completed a survey at baseline, one month, and two months later. The online course, called Resilience Training for Healthcare Workers, consists of three 12-20 minute videos focused on evidence-based skills that support aspects of emotional resilience: mindfulness, mentalization, and self-compassion. Results: A total of 554 participants completed the baseline survey, endorsing moderate to high levels of emotional distress. Of those who completed all three assessments and participated in the course (n = 38), significant improvements in resilience and reductions in emotional distress were found across two months, in comparison to those who did not participate in the course. Discussion: These findings suggest that a brief, online intervention can improve the mental health of healthcare workers during a crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

MEDIATED INTERACTION RITUALS: A GEOGRAPHY OF EVERYDAY LIFE AND CONTENTION IN BLACK LIVES MATTER*

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 295-313
Author(s):  
Sander van Haperen ◽  
Justus Uitermark ◽  
Alex van der Zeeuw
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Image Recognition ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Interaction Ritual ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Geographically Dispersed ◽  
Interaction Rituals ◽  
Ritual Theory ◽  
Different Types

The Movement for Black Lives has connected millions of people online. How are their outrage and hope mediated through social media? To address this question, this article extends Randall Collins’s Interaction Ritual Theory to social media. Employing semisupervised image recognition methods on a million Instagram posts with the hashtag #blacklivesmatter, we identify four different interaction ritual types, each with distinct geographies. Instagram posts featuring interactions with physical copresence are concentrated in urban areas. We identify two different types of such areas: arenas where contention plays out and milieus where movement identities are affirmed. Instagram posts that do not feature physical copresence are more geographically dispersed. These posts, including memes and selfies, allow people to engage with the movement even when they are not embedded in activist environments. Our analysis helps to understand how different forms of engagement are embedded in particular places and connected through the circulation of social media posts.

scholarly journals SARS-CoV-2 transmission and control in a hospital setting: an individual-based modelling study

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qimin Huang ◽  
Anirban Mondal ◽  
Xiaobing Jiang ◽  
Mary Ann Horn ◽  
Fei Fan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Healthcare Workers ◽  
Hospital Setting ◽  
Credible Interval ◽  
Contact Tracing ◽  
Global Public Health ◽  
Minimal Impact ◽  
Social Distancing ◽  
Work Related ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Outbreak Size

Background: Development of strategies for mitigating the severity of COVID-19 is now a top global public health priority. We sought to assess strategies for mitigating the COVID-19 outbreak in a hospital setting via the use of non-pharmaceutical interventions such as social distancing, self-isolation, tracing and quarantine, wearing facial masks/ personal protective equipment. Methods: We developed an individual-based model for COVID-19 transmission among healthcare workers in a hospital setting. We calibrated the model using data of a COVID-19 outbreak in a hospital unit in Wuhan in a Bayesian framework. The calibrated model was used to simulate different intervention scenarios and estimate the impact of different interventions on outbreak size and workday loss. Results: We estimated that work-related stress increases susceptibility to COVID-19 infection among healthcare workers by 52% (90% Credible Interval (CrI): 16.4% - 93.0%). The use of high efficacy facial masks was shown to be able to reduce infection cases and workday loss by 80% (90% CrI: 73.1% - 85.7%) and 87% (CrI: 80.0% - 92.5%), respectively. The use of social distancing alone, through reduced contacts between healthcare workers, had a marginal impact on the outbreak. A strict quarantine policy with the isolation of symptomatic cases and a high fraction of pre-symptomatic/ asymptomatic cases (via contact tracing or high test rate), could only prolong outbreak duration with minimal impact on the outbreak size. Our results indicated that a quarantine policy should be coupled with other interventions to achieve its effect. The effectiveness of all these interventions was shown to increase with their early implementation. Conclusions: Our analysis shows that a COVID-19 outbreak in a hospital's non-COVID-19 unit can be controlled or mitigated by the use of existing non-pharmaceutical measures.

scholarly journals Cognition, Emotions, and Language in Front-Line Healthcare Workers: Clinical and Ethical Implications for Assessment Measures

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-25
Author(s):  
Larysa Zasiekina ◽  
Tetiana Pastryk ◽  
Mariia Kozihora ◽  
Tetiana Fedotova ◽  
Serhii Zasiekin
Keyword(s):  
Protective Factors ◽  
Psychological Stress ◽  
Emotional Distress ◽  
Professional Ethics ◽  
Healthcare Workers ◽  
Healthcare Staff ◽  
Social Contacts ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
Effective Interventions ◽  
Medium Level

Objectives. The article aims to reveal language-based markers of stressful experiences in healthcare workers in terms of their cognitions and emotions.  The following research questions were formulated for the current study: (1) Are risk and protective factors for psychological stress in healthcare staff, working with patients with COVID-19 aligned with anxiety, depression and resilience? (2) Are there any language-based indicators for emotional distress in healthcare staff, working with patients with COVID-19? (3) What are the key cognitions, emotions, and behavioral patterns are expressed in healthcare workers’ staff language? (4) What are words-associations in the Ukrainian Associative Dictionary aligned with language-based indicators of professional ethics in healthcare staff? Materials and Methods. The study applies Beck’s Depression Inventory (BDI-II), Beck’s Anxiety Inventory (BAI), the Brief Resilient Coping Scale (BRCS), the Psychological Stress Scale (PSM-25), and the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC 2015). Results. Results show that healthcare staff demonstrates a low level of psychological stress, depression and anxiety, and a medium level of resilience. The results of multiple linear regression indicate that the only significant negative predictor of stress is resilience. The psycholinguistic analysis of healthcare staff's narrative on their professional experience treating COVID-19 patients shows the key meaningful categories, namely social contacts, cognitive processes, and time. Social contacts are primarily represented by the category family. The word-associations from the Ukrainian Associative Dictionary indicate that feeling of guilt related to professional ethics in healthcare staff is more expressed in men compared with women. Conclusion. The insights gained from this study may be of assistance to developing effective interventions for healthcare staff during a pandemic, primarily focusing on protective factors and weakening feelings of guilt to prevent moral injury. The study also raises some issues of the clinical psycholinguistic approach to examining emotional distress. This approach would be a fruitful area for further work.

scholarly journals Lessons From the First Wave of COVID-19: Work-Related Consequences, Clinical Knowledge, Emotional Distress, and Safety-Conscious Behavior in Healthcare Workers in Switzerland

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Riguzzi ◽  
Shkumbin Gashi
Keyword(s):  
Risk Perception ◽  
Emotional Distress ◽  
Healthcare Workers ◽  
Physical Contact ◽  
Clinical Knowledge ◽  
Physical And Mental Health ◽  
Work Situation ◽  
Cross Sectional Survey ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
The Government

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) imposes an unusual risk to the physical and mental health of healthcare workers and thereby to the functioning of healthcare systems during the crisis. This study investigates the clinical knowledge of healthcare workers about COVID-19, their ways of acquiring information, their emotional distress and risk perception, their adherence to preventive guidelines, their changed work situation due to the pandemic, and their perception of how the healthcare system has coped with the pandemic. It is based on a quantitative cross-sectional survey of 185 Swiss healthcare workers directly attending to patients during the pandemic, with 22% (n = 40) of them being assigned to COVID-19-infected patients. The participants answered between 16th June and 15th July 2020, shortly after the first wave of COVID-19 had been overcome and the national government had relaxed its preventive regulations to a great extent. The questionnaire incorporated parts of the “Standard questionnaire on risk perception of an infectious disease outbreak” (version 2015), which were adapted to the case of COVID-19. Clinical knowledge was lowest regarding the effectiveness of standard hygiene (p < 0.05). Knowledge of infectiousness, incubation time, and life-threatening disease progression was higher, however still significantly lower than regarding asymptomatic cases and transmission without physical contact (p < 0.001). 70% (95%-confidence interval: 64-77%) of the healthcare workers reported considerable emotional distress on at least one of the measured dimensions. They worried significantly more strongly about patients, elderly people, and family members, than about their own health (p < 0.001). Adherence to (not legally binding) preventive guidelines by the government displayed patterns such that not all guidelines were followed equally. Most of the participants were faced with a lack of protective materials, personnel, structures, processes, and contingency plans. An increase in stress level was the most prevalent among the diverse effects the pandemic had on their work situation. Better medical equipment (including drugs), better protection for their own mental and physical health, more (assigned) personnel, more comprehensive information about the symptoms of the disease, and a system of earlier warning were the primary lessons to be learned in view of upcoming waves of the pandemic.

scholarly journals Bibliotherapy: Reading OVID During COVID

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emmanuel Stip ◽  
Linda Östlundh ◽  
Karim Abdel Aziz
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Distress ◽  
Medical Humanities ◽  
Healthcare Workers ◽  
Psychological Impact ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Mitigation Measures ◽  
Personal Problems ◽  
Journal Clubs ◽  
Reading Materials ◽  
Need Support

An epidemic of an infectious disease such as COVID-19 is often a source of emotional distress, even among those who have not been directly exposed to the disease. The period following the acute phase of the coronavirus epidemic and the mitigation measures will likely be hardest for medical professionals in terms of psychological impact. Bibliotherapy is a systematic intervention regarding the use of carefully selected reading materials in order to help persons to cope with stress and personal problems. This therapy can be used easily during the pandemic. The review of evidence shows that this kind of intervention can be helpful in educational and clinical contexts. During the crisis, it can be an alternative to video and film entertainment and a transition from serious medical journal clubs to a softer medical humanities experience. In this article, we summarized the historical background of bibliotherapy. We also proposed a reading list from different times, and cultures relating to pandemic, quarantine, symptoms, confinement, and social impacts (e.g., Camus, Moravia, London, Le Clezio etc.). Bibliotherapy can be a way for doctors and healthcare workers fighting on the frontline of the pandemic to find psychological support and for debriefing. Bibliotherapy can help individuals that need support for emotional distress during the pandemic to verbalize their feelings and emotions and identify new ways of addressing problems.

scholarly journals The Impact of Ruminative Processing on the Development of Intrusive Memories

2007 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 55-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alishia D. Williams ◽  
Michelle L. Moulds
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Emotional Processing ◽  
Depressive Disorders ◽  
Processing Condition ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Self ◽  
Focused Attention ◽  
Substantial Evidence ◽  
Intrusive Memories ◽  
The Impact

AbstractDespite substantial evidence of the detrimental effects of ruminative self-focus, paradoxically (as noted and reviewed by Watkins, 2004) there are clear suggestions that under some circumstances self-focused attention can actually promote well-being and confer benefits. We sought to replicate the findings of Watkins (2004) that adopting an abstract/analytical mode of processing following a negative event results in increased spontaneous intrusions of the event; that is, results in poor emotional processing. In the current study 57 low (BDI-II ≤ 7) and 59 high (BDI-II ≥ 12) dysphoric undergraduate participants viewed a four minute emotion-eliciting video, were randomly assigned to an analytical, experiential, or distraction processing condition, then monitored the frequency of video-related intrusions. Results indicated the effectiveness of the video in inducing moderately distressing intrusions, and suggest that the hypothesised effects of ruminative self-focus on intrusion severity may be dependent upon the self-referential nature of the material to be processed. Results did support previous findings (Williams & Moulds, 2007) that intrusion-related distress is not merely a function of intrusion frequency. Directions for future investigations of the cognitive processes that are important in the maintenance of depressive disorders are discussed.

Wound care during the COVID-19 pandemic: improving outcomes through the integration of telemedicine

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (Sup2) ◽  
pp. S12-S17
Author(s):  
Alisha Oropallo ◽  
John Lantis ◽  
Alexander Martin ◽  
Ammar Al Rubaiay ◽  
Na Wang
Keyword(s):  
High Risk ◽  
Healthcare System ◽  
Personal Protective Equipment ◽  
Healthcare Workers ◽  
Wound Care ◽  
Protective Equipment ◽  
Medical Resources ◽  
Social Distancing ◽  
Vulnerable Patients ◽  
Rapid Spread

COVID-19 is highly contagious and its rapid spread burdens the healthcare system. As the number of confirmed cases goes up, the shortage of medical resources has become a challenge. To avoid the collapse of the healthcare system during the fight with COVID-19, all healthcare workers, including wound care practitioners, should adapt to new roles and use any appropriate methods available to slow the spread of the virus. Integrating telemedicine into wound care during the outbreak helps maintain social distancing, preserve personal protective equipment and medical resources, and eliminate unnecessary exposure for both vulnerable patients and high-risk healthcare workers.

scholarly journals Addressing the Emotional Distress of Healthcare Workers: Creating a Cohesive Resiliency Program Response to COVID-19

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 5-11
Author(s):  
K Gilrain ◽  
P Fizur ◽  
R Allen ◽  
E Campbell ◽  
P Watson ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Distress ◽  
Healthcare Workers
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