ABSTRACT
Nursing home residents' need for behavioral health services is ever-increasing, and the Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated problems in behavioral health involving: (1) access, (2) quality of care, (3) care continuity, and (4) staff education. This case study describes a novel behavioral health program developed at the University of Rochester (UR) to optimize limited clinical resources and address unmet behavioral health needs of New York State's long-term care residents. To deliver effective behavioral health services in nursing homes, UR's behavioral health program has four components: onsite psychiatric nurse support, telepsychiatry, telepsychotherapy, and telementoring. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, this behavioral health program provided services to 29 nursing homes. Over 2 years (2017 to 2019), antipsychotic use among long-stay residents in these homes decreased by 37%. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the program's services expanded to 53 nursing homes. In contrast to increasing antipsychotic use at the national and state levels, long-stay resident antipsychotic use among program nursing homes decreased. With demonstrated success in improving access and outcomes at lower cost, the New York State Office of Mental Health has funded the program's expansion to nursing homes across the state. © 2022 NEJM Catalyst Innovations in Care Delivery. All right reserved.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic had generated issues to individuals worldwide and education was one of the factors that experienced a major downfall. People started to use web conferencing applications during this pandemic since face-to-face meetings and large gatherings are prohibited. Web conferencing software serves a huge factor in business, family, and especially education. The aim of the study is to determine which web conferencing or video telephony applications perform better based on data usage, size, user-friendliness, compatibility, security and safety, features and functionality, reliability, service, and overall satisfaction. After generating the criteria, a total of 210 respondents participated in the online survey to determine the average rating per category based on their experience of using the application Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom. The tallied averages were used in the AHP on the Expert Choice software to determine the weight per criteria. The study result shows that the Google Meet performs better than other two web conferencing applications within the given criteria. © IEOM Society International.
ABSTRACT
Objective: To synthesize the prevalence of psychological and mental health outcomes among healthcare professionals who are responsible for treating patients with COVID-19. Methods: Systematic literature review. The literature search was carried out in the PubMed, CINAHL and Scopus databases. Studies written in English, Portuguese and Spanish and that were published between December 1st 2019 and July 31st 2020 were included. The systematic review was performed using fixed-effect meta-analysis of binary data with STATA (R) 15.0 and inverse-variance method using Freeman-Tukey double arcsine transformation. Results: The search strategy identified 38,657 records. Only five of those studies were selected and were included in the final review corpus. The meta-analysis conducted showed that the prevalence of depression reached 27.5% (95%CI=25.9-29.3;p<0.001), the prevalence of anxiety was 26.8% (95%CI=25.1-28.5;p<0.001), that of insomnia 35.8% (95%CI=33.8-37.9;p=0.03) and the prevalence of stress amounted to 51.9% (95%CI=49.6-54.3;p<0.001). Three of the studies included in the review show that healthcare professionals have also reported significant levels of vicarious traumatization, posttraumatic stress, somatization, and obsessive-compulsive symptoms. Conclusion: The COVID-19 pandemic is found to have a very significant psychological impact on healthcare workers and is quite likely to lead to an important prevalence of depression, anxiety, insomnia, and stress. Frontline healthcare professionals are a particularly vulnerable group and deserve special attention/ intervention.