Psychological support during COVID-19 death notifications: Clinical experiences from a hospital in Mexico.

Abstract

It is estimated that more than 300,000 people have died because of COVID-19 globally. The vast majority of documented deaths have occurred within hospitals, leading to psychological impacts on both family members and health care workers. This paper describes the actions (online death notification education, remote crisis intervention, and support for health care professionals) taken at a hospital in Mexico to address the psychological impacts of the notification of a COVID-19 -related death on both the deceased's relatives and the health care personnel involved.

COVID 19: Psychological Effects and Associated Factors in Mexican Nurses

“…5 The vast majority of documented deaths have occurred within hospitals, leading to the psychological impacts on health-care workers. 6 In the face of a health crisis, not seen in several years in Mexico, COVID-19 is putting health workers, including nursing staff under intense pressure. Historically, nurses have always played an important role in infection prevention, infection control, isolation, containment, and public health, as initially advocated by Florence Nightingale.…”

Developing a Brief Tele-Psychotherapy Model for COVID-19 Patients and Their Family Members

“…Emotional experiences that are often endorse include: worry and anxiety with catastrophic thoughts; moments of despondency and sadness (up to despair) with ideas of loss; anger, especially if the patient is young (anger from loss and anger from injustice); regret (for not having lived to the fullest the last time patient and family member saw each other); sense of guilt (for having transmitted the virus, for having contracted it in a less serious way). Guilt seems particularly relevant for family members, and often surfaces after moments of partial well-being during which they manage to distract themselves (as if to say it is not right to feel good while my family member is in the ICU); 2) For relatives of COVID-19 patients, suffering that originates from bereavement (Landa-Ramírez et al, 2020). Issues related to frozen grief: several patients also lost a parent to COVID-19, but when their significant other is hospitalized, it becomes more evident that they had frozen that grief, partially due to the absence of bereavement ceremonies; 3) Adaptation and functional reorientation due to somatic complications or sequelae (Ran et al, 2020).…”

Clinical Psychology during COVID-19: Experiences from Six Frontline Hospitals in Mexico

“…Given the pandemic context, the Mexican government encouraged people to cremate rather than bury deceased COVID-19 patients, and attendance to funerary rituals were restricted. This generated great distress among the relatives of deceased patients (Landa-Ramírez et al, 2020). Calls were coordinated with the relatives of patients who left the hospital to identify their emotional state and, if appropriate, start remote psychotherapy work.…”

“…This has posed major challenges for hospital professionals, health staff in general, and mental health staff in particular (Percudani et al, 2020). The clinical psychology sector of hospital systems has also needed to adapt its professional practices to provide care during the pandemic, thus generating valuable learning opportunities and challenges for psychological care needs on the front lines of COVID-19 (Cao di San Marco et al, 2020;Landa-Ramírez et al, 2020). As such, this text seeks to describe the lessons, practices and challenges which arose from providing clinical care to patients, families, and health �orkers in six COVID-19 hospitals in Mexico during the first seven months of this pandemic (February-September 2020).…”