Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has posed an unprecedented demand and a huge burden for healthcare workers (HCWs) worldwide, with alarming reports of heightened mental health problems. To counteract these mental health challenges, guidelines and recommendations for the support of HCWs during the COVID-19 pandemic have been published. With this scoping review and guideline evaluation, we aim to provide a critical overview of these guidelines and recommendations and to guide policy makers in establishing respective surveillance and care programs. In summary, 41 articles were included in this review which were published between April 2020 and May 2021. Across all articles, the guidelines and recommendations could be clustered into four main categories: “Social/structural support,” “Work environment,” “Communication/Information,” “Mental health support.” Although there was substantial agreement across articles about the recommendations given, empirical evidence on the effectiveness of these recommendations is still lacking. Moreover, most recommendations were developed without involving different members of the target group (HCWs) or other involved stakeholders. Strategies to detect potential barriers and to implement these guidelines in clinical practice are lacking.
Highlights
The COVID-19 pandemic has posed an unprecedented demand and a huge challenge for healthcare workers (HCW), including physicians, nurses, interns, allied health professionals and other people working in the healthcare sector, worldwide for more than a year
Due to the lack of scientific studies investigating the effectiveness of the suggested interventions and recommendations, it is uncertain whether they are beneficial to HCWs
We conducted this scoping review to provide a comprehensive overview on published guidelines and recommendations for the support of HCWs during the COVID19 pandemic and to critically evaluate these
Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic has posed an unprecedented demand and a huge challenge for healthcare workers (HCW), including physicians, nurses, interns, allied health professionals and other people working in the healthcare sector, worldwide for more than a year now. Similar findings were reported in another review article focusing exclusively on COVID-19, which showed that poor mental health outcomes were higher in nurses and were linked to inadequate personal protective equipment (PPE), fear of infection and heavy workload (2) Given these alarming reports, the question has been voiced of what can be done to protect HCWs and to reduce the risk of mental health burden during pandemic outbreaks in this crucial target group. Guidelines and recommendation papers can be considered instruments of quality management of the healthcare system aiming at improving quality and effectiveness of diagnostic and treatment procedures (4) Based on this framework, we conducted this scoping review to provide a comprehensive overview on published guidelines and recommendations for the support of HCWs during the COVID19 pandemic and to critically evaluate these. The overall goal is to provide a comprehensive overview of the available evidence in order to guide policy makers in developing surveillance and care programs to improve mental health in healthcare workers during the pandemic
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