In April 2020, the European Society for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (ESCAP) Research Academy and the ESCAP Board launched the first questionnaire of the CovCAP longitudinal survey to estimate the impact of COVID-19 on child and adolescent psychiatry (CAP) services in Europe. In this brief report, we present the main findings from the second questionnaire of the survey, one year after the COVID-19 pandemic began to hit Europe (i.e., February/March 2021). While service delivery to patients and their families was affected in a major way (reported by 68%) at the beginning of the pandemic, the majority of respondents (59%) in this second survey only reported a minor impact on care delivery. The use of telemedicine remained widespread (91%) but the proportion of CAP services partially closed or transformed to accommodate COVID-19 patients (59% in 2020) dropped to 20%. On the other hand, the perceived impact on the mental health and psychopathology of children and adolescents dramatically increased from “medium” (> 50%) in 2020 to “strong” or “extreme” (80%) in 2021. Four nosographic entities were particularly impacted: suicidal crises, anxiety disorders, eating disorders and major depressive episodes. Accordingly, this was associated with a substantial increase in the number of referrals or requests for assessments (91% reported an increase in 2021 while 61% reported a decrease in 2020). Finally, heads of the CAP departments expressed strong concerns regarding the management of the long-term consequences of this crisis, especially regarding the provision of care in light of the perceived increase in referrals.
Supplementary Information
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00787-021-01851-1.
Recent years have seen a multiplication of terrorist attacks in public places across European and North American countries, thus heightening the need for public mental health planning and response strategies focused on the special needs of children and their families. The present article retrospectively analyzes the early phase psychiatric response for children and adolescents after the truck attack in Nice on July 14th, 2016. In addition, lessons which can be drawn from it will be discussed, with a focus on organizational challenges in the early phase. During the first 2 weeks after the attack, 668 individuals have been registered at the medico-psychological emergency unit of the Children's Hospitals of Nice, including 365 (54.6%) children and adolescents of all ages. Overall, 146 child and adolescent mental health care professionals participated in this specific facility, including 75 psychiatrists and psychologists. The implementation of the medico-psychological emergency unit dedicated to the pediatric population has been an indispensable and unprecedented public health challenge in our country. Future studies are needed in order to evaluate and to improve the efficiency of the individual as well as collective impact of early phase psychiatric interventions dedicated for children and adolescents after mass trauma.
In the actual context of terrorism targeting children and families, it seems essential to describe different experiences of pediatric psychological emergency devices after such unexpected mass trauma. Here we testify our experience of the psychological emergency care setup dedicated to children and families during the first 48 hours after the terrorist attack of Nice, France, on July 14, 2016. Activated within the hour following the attack, the device included two child psychiatry teams turning over each day, receiving at least 163 individuals (99 children and 64 adults) within the first 2 days. (Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness. 2018;page 1 of 3).
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