Ethical and Psychological Support for Health Care Professions in Intensive Care Units in the COVID19 Pandemic Context: Adequacy With Needs and Psychological Impact Crisis and Post-crisis

Overview

The intensive care unit occupies a particular place in our health care system. The urgency of the clinical situations, the proportion of deaths encountered, and the daily workload is likely to generate suffering among staff. The health crisis linked to SARS-COV-2 is unprecedented and has leads to the unprecedented mobilisation of care providers, particularly in the ICU. Faced with the massive and growing influx of patients, human, therapeutic and material resources are overwhelmed and the teams are faced with an unusually heavy workload in a context of extreme tension. These professionals are thus exposed to a risk of over-investment, in a context of acute and repetitive stress, over an indeterminate period of time combining workload, emotional intensity with specific ethical issues, simultaneously affecting the professional sphere but also the personal and family sphere (confinement, risk of contamination). Now more than ever, the mental health of caregivers is an important concern, as highlighted by the CCNE. Mental health is understood in the way in which the individual responds specifically to work-related suffering by developing individual and collective defensive strategies. Thus, the issue of mental health in the ICU cannot be considered without taking into account the strategies that professionals put in place to combat stress and to contribute or not to the construction and stabilization of the work collective (collaboration, support). Ethical and/or psychological support systems have been set up in most of the establishments involved in the care of Covid-19 patients. However, the adequacy of these systems relative to the needs of professionals during and after the crisis is not yet known. We hypothesize that the psychological and social repercussions of this pandemic as well as the individual and collective strategies deployed by ICU care providers to deal with it will evolve in view of the progression of the crisis but also of the various types of support, particularly psychological and/or ethical, available to them.

Conditions