Use it or lose it? Identifying reasons for the low use of psychosocial support by hospital staff.

BACKGROUND: Psychosocial support programs are a way for hospitals to support the mental health of their staff. However, while support is needed, utilization of support by hospital staff remains low. This study aims to identify reasons for non-use and elements that are important to consider when offering psychosocial support. METHODS: This mixed-method, multiple case study used survey data and in-depth interviews to assess the extent of psychosocial support use, reasons for non-use and perceived important elements regarding the offering of psychosocial support among Dutch hospital staff. The study focused on a time of especially high need, namely the COVID-19 pandemic. Descriptive statistics were used to assess frequency of use among 1514 staff. The constant comparative method was used to analyze answers provided to two open-ended survey questions (n = 274 respondents) and in-depth interviews (n = 37 interviewees). RESULTS: The use of psychosocial support decreased from 8.4% in December 2020 to 3.6% by September 2021. We identified four main reasons for non-use of support: deeming support unnecessary, deeming support unsuitable, being unaware of the availability, or feeling undeserving of support. Furthermore, we uncovered four important elements: offer support structurally after the crisis, adjust support to diverse needs, ensure accessibility and awareness, and an active role for supervisors. CONCLUSIONS: Our results show that the low use of psychosocial support by hospital staff is shaped by individual, organizational, and support-specific factors. These factors can be targeted to increase use of psychosocial support, whereby it is important to also focus on the wider hospital workforce in addition to frontline staff.

To Uncertainty and Beyond: Identifying the Capabilities Needed by Hospitals to Function in Dynamic Environments.

Hospitals operate in increasingly complex and dynamically uncertain environments. To understand how hospital organizations can cope with such profound uncertainty, this article presents a multiple case study of five hospitals during the COVID-19 crisis in a heavily hit region of the Netherlands. We find that hospitals make adaptations in five key categories, namely: reorganization, decision-making, human resources, material resources, and planning. These adaptations offer insights into the core capabilities needed by hospitals to cope with dynamic uncertainty. Our findings highlight the need for hospitals to become more flexible without sacrificing efficiency. Organizations can accomplish this by building in more sensing and seizing capabilities to be better prepared for and respond to environmental change. Furthermore, transforming capabilities allow organizations to be more resilient and responsive in the face of ongoing uncertainty. We make recommendations on how hospitals can build these capabilities and address the core challenges they face in this pursuit.

There and back again. Examining the development of employee commitment during a prolonged crisis.

To effectively function and adapt in crises, healthcare organizations rely on the skills and commitment of their workforce. Yet, our current understanding of how employees' workplace commitment is affected by and evolves throughout the course of a crisis remains limited. In this paper, we explore the commitment of hospital staff to an important workplace target, the COVID-19 crisis response, and show how this commitment develops over time. We report on an exploratory case study of hospital staff in a heavily hit region of the Netherlands. We conducted interviews with hospital executives, management, medical and support staff to uncover the issues hospitals faced in recruiting staff to provide COVID-19 care throughout the first and second wave of the crisis. Our findings suggest that while staff initially exhibited high levels of commitment to aiding in the crisis effort, staff were perceived to exhibit lower levels of commitment in the second wave, complicating the provision of COVID-19 care. We unveil three contributing factors to this shift, namely: competing demands, energy depletion and a lack of support and appreciation. Our findings suggest that while staff were initially willing to dedicate themselves and take responsibility for the crisis effort, as their other more stable commitments became more salient in the second wave, their willingness to dedicate limited resources to the crisis effort decreased. In our discussion, we examine the implications of our findings for the literature on workplace commitment, and advance our understanding of employee workplace commitment during crises.

Even Superheroes Need Rest: A Guide to Facilitating Recovery from Work for Health-care Workers during COVID-19 and beyond.

The COVID-19 pandemic burdens health-care workers (HCWs) worldwide. Amid high-stress conditions and unprecedented needs for crisis management, organizations face the grand challenge of supporting the mental health and well-being of their HCWs. The current literature on mental health and well-being primarily focuses on improving personal resilience among HCWs. However, this puts the responsibility for coping with COVID-19-related stress almost fully on the individual. This chapter discusses an important alternative framing of this issue - how health-care organizations (HCOs) can facilitate recovery from work processes (i.e., returning to a baseline level by engaging in nonwork activities after work) for their workers. Based on a narrative review of the occupational health psychology literature, we provide practical strategies for supporting the four key recovery experiences of detachment, control, mastery, and relaxation, as well as present general recommendations about how to promote recovery. These strategies can help HCOs facing the grand challenge of sustaining worker well-being and functioning during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as during future pandemics and for workers facing high work pressure in general.

COVID-19 and the need for integrative holistic research

Additionally, personality characteristics could be taken into account as predictors of successful adjustment to the new circumstances and as protective factors for preserving mental health in times of high uncertainty, such as during pandemics. [...]resources in the family sphere should be considered more extensively, such as family/household resilience, cohesion, and relationship quality. [...]the extent to which working parents fall back to gendered parent roles during confinement may influence work–family issues. In line with the multiphenomenon approach proposed, children may drive demands (e.g., well-being related worries) as well as resources (e.g., positive interpersonal interactions) in the private sphere that are inherently relevant to important employee outcomes (i.e., well-being, health, and performance). [...]spillover (i.e., issues in the private sphere affecting work or viceversa;as also labeled by Rudolph etal.) but also crossover (i.e., issues of one household member spreading to other household members) effects to and from children as potential stakeholders are essential to consider. [...]social media data (e.g., from Twitter or Facebook) or geolocation data may be harvested to supplement self-report data in identifying changes in employees’ affective experiences and behavioral patterns over time due to the threats of the pandemic itself or confinement measures.

Addressing evolving patient concerns around telehealth in the COVID-19 era.

With a rapid shift to telehealth during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, clinicians, health care organizations, and policy makers must consider and address patients' evolving needs, concerns, and expectations.