A final review: How are our children doing right now?

In caring for our pediatric patients, we will continue to live with the fact that the disruptions have not been uniformly felt, with increased impact on Black and Brown children and those living in poverty;additionally, levels of access to routine pediatric health services have varied throughout the pandemic.1 For all children, though, we have to make up much lost time when it comes to physical, mental, and academic concerns, as well as socialization issues. Because schools provide another resource for identifying and addressing mental health concerns, the complete or partial shift to virtual learning likely compounded the mental health crisis. According to one study, "the prevalence of depression and anxiety symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic has doubled, compared with prepan-demic estimates. Early childhood: A profound degree of development takes place from birth to 5 years of life. Because of the pandemic, children 5 years and younger have spent all or a significant portion of their lives in social isolation alongside parents or caregivers.

Workplace Violence and the Mental Health of Public Health Workers During COVID-19.

INTRODUCTION: During the COVID-19 pandemic, public health workers were at an increased risk for violence and harassment due to their public health work and experienced adverse mental health conditions. This article quantifies the prevalence of job-related threats, harassment, and discrimination against public health workers and measures the association of these incidents with mental health symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic. METHODS: A nonprobability convenience sample of state, local, and tribal public health workers completed a self-administered, online survey in April 2021. The survey link was emailed to members of national public health associations and included questions on workplace violence, demographics, workplace factors, and mental health symptoms. Mental health symptoms were measured using standardized, validated tools to assess depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and suicidal ideation. Multivariable Poisson models calculated adjusted prevalence ratios of mental health symptoms, with workplace violence as the primary risk factor. Analyses were conducted in 2021-2022. RESULTS: Experiencing any type or combination of workplace violence was significantly associated with an increased likelihood of reporting depression symptoms (prevalence ratio=1.21, 95% CI=1.15, 1.27), anxiety (prevalence ratio=1.21, 95% CI=1.15, 1.27), post-traumatic stress disorder (prevalence ratio=1.31, 95% CI=1.25, 1.37), and suicidal ideation (prevalence ratio=1.26, 95% CI=1.14, 1.38), after adjusting for confounders. A dose‒response relationship was found between the number of workplace violence events experienced by a public health worker and the likelihood of reporting mental health symptoms. CONCLUSIONS: Violence targeted at the public health workforce is detrimental to workers and their communities. Ongoing training, workplace support, and increased communication after a workplace violence incident may be helpful. Efforts to strengthen public health capacities and support the public health workforce are also needed.

Occurrences of Workplace Violence Related to the COVID-19 Pandemic, United States, March 2020 to August 2021.

As businesses dealt with an increasingly anxious public during the COVID-19 pandemic and were frequently tasked with enforcing various COVID-19 prevention policies such as mask mandates, workplace violence and harassment (WPV) emerged as an increasing important issue affecting worker safety and health. Publicly available media reports were searched for WPV events related to the COVID-19 pandemic that occurred during 1 March 2020, and 31 August 2021, using Google News aggregator services scans with data abstraction and verification. The search found 408 unique WPV events related to COVID-19. Almost two-thirds involved mask disputes. Over half (57%) of the 408 events occurred in retail (38%) and food service (19%). We also conducted a comparison of events identified in this search to a similar study of media reports between March 2020 to October 2020 that used multiple search engines to identify WPV events. Despite similar conclusions, a one-to-one comparison of relevant data from these studies found only modest overlap in the incidents identified, suggesting the need to make improvements to future efforts to extract data from media reports. Prevention resources such as training and education for workers may help industries de-escalate or prevent similar WPV events in the future.

Mindfulness in primary school children as a route to enhanced life satisfaction, positive outlook and effective emotion regulation

BACKGROUND: Mindfulness programmes as a potential avenue of enhancing pupil wellbeing are beginning to show great promise. However, research concerning the effectiveness of mindfulness training for primary aged school children (7-11 years of age) has been neglected. METHODS: Building on methodological limitations of prior research, this study employed an active controlled design to assess the longer term wellbeing and emotion regulation outcomes after a 6 week mindfulness programme (Living Mindfully Programme, UK), for a group of school children aged between 9 and 10. The programme was delivered by class teachers as part of their normal curriculum entitlement. One hundred and eight children took part from across three schools in North East of England. Participants formed a treatment group (n = 64), active control (n = 19) and wait list control (n = 25). Self-report measures of wellbeing, mindfulness and emotion regulation were collected at pre and post training as well as at 3 months follow up. RESULTS: Reliable findings, judged by medium to large effect sizes across both post intervention, follow-up and between both controls, demonstrated enhancement in a number of domains. Immediately after training and follow up, when compared with the wait list control, children who received mindfulness training showed significant improvements in mindfulness (d = .76 and .77), Positive Outlook (d = .55 and .64) and Life Satisfaction (d = .65 and 0.72). Even when compared to an active control, the effects remained although diminished reflecting the positive impact of the active control condition. Furthermore, a significant positive relationship was found between changes in mindfulness and changes in cognitive reappraisal. CONCLUSIONS: Taken together, this study provides preliminary evidence that the Living Mindfully Primary Programme is feasibly delivered by school staff, enjoyed by the children and may significantly improve particular components of wellbeing. Importantly, higher levels of mindfulness as a result of training may be related to effective emotional regulatory and cognitive reappraisal strategies.