Exploring the psychological impact of contact tracing work on staff during the COVID-19 pandemic.

BACKGROUND: Contact tracing is a key control measure in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. While quantitative research has been conducted on the psychological impact of the pandemic on other frontline healthcare workers, none has explored the impact on contact tracing staff. METHODS: A longitudinal study was conducted using two repeated measures with contact tracing staff employed in Ireland during the COVID-19 pandemic using two-tailed independent samples t tests and exploratory linear mixed models. RESULTS: The study sample included 137 contact tracers in March 2021 (T1) and 218 in September 2021 (T3). There was an increase from T1 to T3 in burnout related exhaustion (p < 0·001), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptom scores (p < 0·001), mental distress (p < 0·01), perceived stress (p < 0·001) and tension and pressure (p < 0·001). In those aged 18-30, there was an increase in exhaustion related burnout (p < 0·01), PTSD symptoms (p < 0·05), and tension and pressure scores (p < 0·05). Additionally, participants with a background in healthcare showed an increase in PTSD symptom scores by T3 (p < 0·001), reaching mean scores equivalent to those of participants who did not have a background in healthcare. CONCLUSIONS: Contact tracing staff working during the COVID-19 pandemic experienced an increase in adverse psychological outcomes. These findings highlight a need for further research on psychological supports required by contact tracing staff with differing demographic profiles.

Intersectionality of race, ethnicity, and culture in neglect, abuse, and violence against older persons: Human rights, global health, and systems approaches in pandemics

Although prevalent in the 1990s, research on social and economic determinants of elder abuse, including race, ethnicity, and culture, has lagged in recent years, compromising understanding of elder abuse as a public health problem calling for systems responses. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the tragic impact of substantial disruptions in access to care across fragmented health systems and community-based settings on vulnerable older adults and, in such crisis conditions, the persistence of both violations of older adults' human rights and historical inequities in their treatment. Older adults have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19, particularly older Black/African Americans and Latinx and those living in congregate settings such as nursing homes, assisted living facilities, and prisons, as reflected in reporting of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. American Indian reservations and indigenous and tribal communities are also struggling with the effects of the pandemic on the health and economic security of their members. The pandemic is exposing challenges that have heretofore been ignored or covered up, or have remained otherwise invisible, such as institutional neglect, poverty, deprivation, and isolation, yet have deepened suffering of older adults. However, little is yet known about older persons' experience of abuse, neglect, and violence during pandemic crisis conditions, such as sheltering-in-place, quarantines or lockdowns, or situations of scarce resources including intensive care unit beds, medical equipment, and personal protective equipment. The risks created by these conditions and their palpable urgency call for critical examination of the contribution of structural inequities to older adults' heightened risk in disaster and post-disaster environments and the disproportionate impact of crisis conditions (Institute of Medicine [IOM], Crisis standards of care: A systems framework for catastrophic disaster response: Volume 1: Introduction and CSC framework. The National Academies Press, Washington, DC, 2012. https://doi.org/10.17226/13351) upon the human rights of diverse older adult populations and communities. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Health inequities and social determinants of health in refugee and immigrant communities.

This article evaluates and elucidates the intersections across social and economic determinants of health and social structures that maintain current inequities and structural violence with a focus on the impact on imMigrants (immigrants and migrants), refugees, and those who remain invisible (e.g., people without immigration status who reside in the United States) from Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communities. Psychology has a history of treating individuals and families without adequately considering how trauma is cyclically and generationally maintained by structural violence, inequitable resources, and access to services. The field has not fully developed collaboration within an interdisciplinary framework or learning from best practices through international/global partnerships. Psychology has also been inattentive to the impact of structural violence prominent in impoverished communities. This structural harm has taken the form of the criminalization of imMigrants and refugees through detention, incarceration, and asylum citizenship processes. Most recently, the simultaneous occurrence of multiple catastrophic events, such as COVID-19, political polarization and unrest, police violence, and acceleration of climate change, has created a hypercomplex emergency for marginalized and vulnerable groups. We advance a framework that psychologists can use to inform, guide, and integrate their work. The foundation of this framework is select United Nations Sustainable Development Goals to address health inequities. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

A methodological approach to intra-action reviews - application and adaptation of existing global guidance during the COVID-19 pandemic response in Ireland, 2021.

Many countries were under-prepared for the arrival of an emergency such as the COVID-19 pandemic. An intra-action review allows countries, systems and services to reflect on their preparedness and response to date, and revise their policies and approaches as needed. We describe the approach to undertaking an intra-action review of Ireland's Health Protection COVID-19 response during 2021. A project team within National Health Protection developed a project plan, identified key stakeholders, trained facilitators and designed workshop programmes, employing integrated collaborative web tools. Multidisciplinary representatives participated in three half-day, independently facilitated workshops on challenges and solutions within specific response areas: communication, governance and cross-cutting themes such as staff well-being. An all-stakeholder survey sought further in-depth detail. Participants reviewed the ongoing pandemic response in terms of good practice and challenges and recommended implementable solutions. We customised our mixed-methods approach using existing ECDC/WHO guidance, producing consensus recommendations during Ireland's fourth wave of COVID-19, with particular focus on pathways to implementation. Our adaptations may help others in formulating and customising methodological approaches. During an emergency, identifying and reflecting on good practices to retain, and areas for strengthening, with a clear action plan of implementing recommendations, will enhance preparedness now, and for future emergencies.

A model of collaborative immigration advocacy to prevent policy-based trauma and harm.

OBJECTIVE: Research suggests that antiimmigrant policies enacted in the United States, magnified during the 2016-2020 period, propagate widespread trauma across communities of immigrants (von Werthern et al., 2018). While these policies harm all groups of immigrants, structural conditions (e.g., lack of documentation status, race, ethnicity, country of origin, and other social and legal determinants) shape how they are experienced. To address the widespread traumatic harm inflicted by racist and xenophobic policies, a group of leaders from eight Divisions of the American Psychological Association (APA) and the National Latinx Psychological Association (NLPA) launched an Interdivisional Immigration Project (IIP). METHOD: The IIP served to develop a model for collaborative advocacy, bringing together mental health providers (i.e., psychologists, social workers), allied professionals, and immigration activists from community organizations across the country. This model was developed over the course of 1 year, coinciding with the global coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and the amplified movement for racial justice. RESULTS: This article describes the key components of the IIP collaborative advocacy model: (a) structuring leadership in a democratic and egalitarian manner, (b) centering and uplifting immigrant voices, (c) forming teams across five U.S. regions, (d) facilitating critical dialogues grounded in liberatory practices, (e) centering trauma and empowerment, and (f) developing advocacy strategies. The IIP collaborative advocacy model is informing advocacy to protect immigrants from harm. DISCUSSION: This model may be used as the basis for ongoing humane immigration policy activism that centers the voices of community activists, and that pushes psychologists and allied professionals to use their positionality to support community-based efforts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

The introduction to law, medicine, and bioethics: Role of interdisciplinary leadership in influencing health and public health policy and democratic systems of governance

This collection of articles takes up a thematic focus on law, medicine, and bioethics in the contexts of the pandemic environment, including a range of issues concerning democracy, climate change and adaptive governance, structural inequities and health disparities, and social justice. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives, contributors to the collection of articles engage with the transformations in psychological and social life being wrought by the pandemic experience, challenging theorizing embedded in neoliberal paradigms that heighten suffering and risks of harm for vulnerable communities, and proposing alternative theoretical frameworks relevant to the global world and global health as radicalized by pandemic threats. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved) Impact Statement Public Significance Statement-This article serves a critically important public interest at this time in the unfolding history of psychology and the relationship of psychology to the experience of the global world in the COVID-19 pandemic environment as it has impacted diverse societies and peoples. The authors highlight the expanding role and responsibility of psychology in engaging in interdisciplinary dialogues across the domains of law, medicine, and bioethics and their influence on democratic systems of governance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)

Protecting the Public's Health in Pandemics: Reflections on Policy Deliberation and the Role of Civil Society in Democracy.

The COVID-19 pandemic ("the pandemic") has magnified the critical importance of public policy deliberation in public health emergency circumstances when normal health care operations are disrupted, and crisis conditions prevail. Adopting the lens of syndemic theory, the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on vulnerable older adults suggests that the pandemic has heightened pre-existing precarities and racial inequities across diverse older adult populations, underlining the urgency of needed policy reforms. While the pandemic has called attention to systemic failures in U.S. public health emergency planning at both federal and state levels of government, the important role of civil society in influencing policy decision making and advocating for legal and ethics reforms and social change in a democracy calls for more open dialogue in aging, public health and legal communities and constituencies. To foster this dialogue, one public health lawyer, who is also a bioethicist and gerontological social work researcher and served as chair of the New York State Bar Association Health Law Section COVID Task Force in 2020 ("Task Force"), shares her first-person perspectives on the process of leading the development of a statewide bar's recommendations for policy reforms, including the challenges and conflicts encountered. A hospital-based attorney and clinical bioethicist brings a clinical ethics perspective to the discussions. This first-person contribution discusses the power of constituencies to influence policy deliberation in a democracy, and the implications of the Task Force recommendations for future aging and public health policy, particularly in view of the high suffering burdens and trauma older persons and older people of color have borne during the pandemic.