Covid ICYMI

Key clinical point: In patients with nonvalvular atrial fibrillation (AF), warfarin use was linked to a lower risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection and adverse COVID-19 outcomes compared with the use of direct oral anticoagulants (DOACs).

Major finding: Warfarin vs DOAC use was associated with a lower risk for testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 (adjusted hazard ratio [aHR]; 0.73; 95% CI, 0.68-0.79), COVID-19-related hospitalization (aHR, 0.75; 95% CI, 0.68-0.83), and COVID-19-related mortality (aHR, 0.74; 95% CI, 0.66-0.83).

Study details: The details come from a population-based cohort study involving 92,339 warfarin users and 280,407 DOAC users. The OpenSAFELY platform was used for data analysis.

Disclosures: The OpenSAFELY data science platform was funded by the Wellcome Trust. OpenSAFELY work was jointly funded by UKRI, NIHR, Asthma UK-BLF, and the Longitudinal Health and Wellbeing strand of the National Core Studies programme. Principal investigator B Goldacre reported relationships with various research organizations. The co-principal investigator IJ Douglas reported ties with GSK.

Source: OpenSAFELY Collaborative et al. J Hematol Oncol. 2021 Oct 19. doi: 10.1186/s13045-021-01185-0.

Key clinical point: In patients with nonvalvular atrial fibrillation (AF), warfarin use was linked to a lower risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection and adverse COVID-19 outcomes compared with the use of direct oral anticoagulants (DOACs).

Major finding: Warfarin vs DOAC use was associated with a lower risk for testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 (adjusted hazard ratio [aHR]; 0.73; 95% CI, 0.68-0.79), COVID-19-related hospitalization (aHR, 0.75; 95% CI, 0.68-0.83), and COVID-19-related mortality (aHR, 0.74; 95% CI, 0.66-0.83).

Study details: The details come from a population-based cohort study involving 92,339 warfarin users and 280,407 DOAC users. The OpenSAFELY platform was used for data analysis.

Disclosures: The OpenSAFELY data science platform was funded by the Wellcome Trust. OpenSAFELY work was jointly funded by UKRI, NIHR, Asthma UK-BLF, and the Longitudinal Health and Wellbeing strand of the National Core Studies programme. Principal investigator B Goldacre reported relationships with various research organizations. The co-principal investigator IJ Douglas reported ties with GSK.

Source: OpenSAFELY Collaborative et al. J Hematol Oncol. 2021 Oct 19. doi: 10.1186/s13045-021-01185-0.

Key clinical point: In patients with nonvalvular atrial fibrillation (AF), warfarin use was linked to a lower risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection and adverse COVID-19 outcomes compared with the use of direct oral anticoagulants (DOACs).

Major finding: Warfarin vs DOAC use was associated with a lower risk for testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 (adjusted hazard ratio [aHR]; 0.73; 95% CI, 0.68-0.79), COVID-19-related hospitalization (aHR, 0.75; 95% CI, 0.68-0.83), and COVID-19-related mortality (aHR, 0.74; 95% CI, 0.66-0.83).

Study details: The details come from a population-based cohort study involving 92,339 warfarin users and 280,407 DOAC users. The OpenSAFELY platform was used for data analysis.

Disclosures: The OpenSAFELY data science platform was funded by the Wellcome Trust. OpenSAFELY work was jointly funded by UKRI, NIHR, Asthma UK-BLF, and the Longitudinal Health and Wellbeing strand of the National Core Studies programme. Principal investigator B Goldacre reported relationships with various research organizations. The co-principal investigator IJ Douglas reported ties with GSK.

Source: OpenSAFELY Collaborative et al. J Hematol Oncol. 2021 Oct 19. doi: 10.1186/s13045-021-01185-0.

Key clinical point: There is an increased risk of neurological complications following COVID-19 vaccination; however, this risk is substantially higher following SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Major finding: There was an increased risk for Guillain-Barré syndrome and Bell’s palsy following vaccination with ChAdOx1nCoV-19 (incidence rate ratio [IRR], 2.90 [95% CI, 2.15-3.92] and 1.29 [95% CI, 1.08-1.56], respectively) and for hemorrhagic stroke following vaccination with BNT162b2 (IRR, 1.38; 95% CI, 1.12-1.71). The risk for all neurological complications was significantly higher within 28 days of a positive SARS-CoV-2 test, including Guillain-Barré syndrome (IRR, 5.25; 95% CI, 3.00-9.18).

Study details: The data come from an analysis of 20,417,752 individuals who received ChAdOx1nCoV-19 (AstraZeneca) COVID-19 vaccine, 12,134,782 who received BNT162b2 (Pfizer-BioNTech) COVID-19 vaccine, and 2,005,280 who tested positive for COVID-19.

Disclosures: No specific funding information was available. A Sheikh, D Hunt, K Khunti, C Robertson, and J Hippisley-Cox reported ties with various research organizations and/or advisory groups. The remaining authors declared no conflict of interests.

Source: Patone M et al. Nat Med. 2021 Oct 25. doi: 10.1038/s41591-021-01556-7.

Key clinical point: There is an increased risk of neurological complications following COVID-19 vaccination; however, this risk is substantially higher following SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Major finding: There was an increased risk for Guillain-Barré syndrome and Bell’s palsy following vaccination with ChAdOx1nCoV-19 (incidence rate ratio [IRR], 2.90 [95% CI, 2.15-3.92] and 1.29 [95% CI, 1.08-1.56], respectively) and for hemorrhagic stroke following vaccination with BNT162b2 (IRR, 1.38; 95% CI, 1.12-1.71). The risk for all neurological complications was significantly higher within 28 days of a positive SARS-CoV-2 test, including Guillain-Barré syndrome (IRR, 5.25; 95% CI, 3.00-9.18).

Study details: The data come from an analysis of 20,417,752 individuals who received ChAdOx1nCoV-19 (AstraZeneca) COVID-19 vaccine, 12,134,782 who received BNT162b2 (Pfizer-BioNTech) COVID-19 vaccine, and 2,005,280 who tested positive for COVID-19.

Disclosures: No specific funding information was available. A Sheikh, D Hunt, K Khunti, C Robertson, and J Hippisley-Cox reported ties with various research organizations and/or advisory groups. The remaining authors declared no conflict of interests.

Source: Patone M et al. Nat Med. 2021 Oct 25. doi: 10.1038/s41591-021-01556-7.

Key clinical point: There is an increased risk of neurological complications following COVID-19 vaccination; however, this risk is substantially higher following SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Major finding: There was an increased risk for Guillain-Barré syndrome and Bell’s palsy following vaccination with ChAdOx1nCoV-19 (incidence rate ratio [IRR], 2.90 [95% CI, 2.15-3.92] and 1.29 [95% CI, 1.08-1.56], respectively) and for hemorrhagic stroke following vaccination with BNT162b2 (IRR, 1.38; 95% CI, 1.12-1.71). The risk for all neurological complications was significantly higher within 28 days of a positive SARS-CoV-2 test, including Guillain-Barré syndrome (IRR, 5.25; 95% CI, 3.00-9.18).

Study details: The data come from an analysis of 20,417,752 individuals who received ChAdOx1nCoV-19 (AstraZeneca) COVID-19 vaccine, 12,134,782 who received BNT162b2 (Pfizer-BioNTech) COVID-19 vaccine, and 2,005,280 who tested positive for COVID-19.

Disclosures: No specific funding information was available. A Sheikh, D Hunt, K Khunti, C Robertson, and J Hippisley-Cox reported ties with various research organizations and/or advisory groups. The remaining authors declared no conflict of interests.

Source: Patone M et al. Nat Med. 2021 Oct 25. doi: 10.1038/s41591-021-01556-7.

A majority of healthy preschoolers were able to recognize emotions shown in static pictures of adults with and without face masks, based on data from a cross-sectional study of 276 children.

Some are concerned about the effects of adults working in preschools wearing face masks on the ability of young children to learn to recognize emotions, study author Juliane Schneider, MD, of University Hospital Lausanne (Switzerland), and colleagues wrote. Previous studies using photographs of faces with digitally added masks have suggested that young children’s emotional recognition was worse with masked faces.

In the study published in JAMA Pediatrics, the researchers tested the impact of masks on the ability of preschool children to identify joy, anger, and sadness. The study included 135 girls and 141 boys aged 36-72 months with a mean age of 52.4 months. The tests were conducted at nine daycare centers.

Children were shown photographs of 15 actors (5 men and 10 women) with and without surgical face masks. The total data set included 90 pictures illustrating joy, anger, and sadness. The children were shown the pictures at random, and they could either name the emotion, point to a card with emoticons showing the three emotions, or respond “I don’t know” or “quit the experiment.” Test sessions lasted approximately 7 minutes per child. Effect sizes were calculated using X² and Cramer V tests.

Overall, 68.8% of the children correctly identified the emotion portrayed; the correct response rate was 70.6% for faces without face masks and 66.9% for those with face masks. Correct recognition of joy was significantly higher for faces without masks than for those with masks (94.8% vs. 87.3), as was correct recognition of sadness (54.1% vs. 48.9%; P < .001 for both). Recognition of anger was not significantly different for unmasked and masked faces (62.2% vs. 64.6%, P = .10).

No significant differences in correct responses appeared between boys and girls and the rate of correct responses increased significantly with age. The rates of “I don’t know,” and “quit the experiment” responses were 3.1% and 2.2%, respectively. In an analysis of incorrect responses, approximately 25% of the children confused anger and sadness, and 21% misidentified joy for images of anger or sadness.

“Overall, participants in this study, who had been exposed to face masks for nearly a year, recognized emotions on pictures better than has been reported in previous research, even with face masks,” the researchers wrote.

The study findings were limited by several factors including the use of static pictures versus real individuals, which limits generalizability, and the lack of data on children with developmental issues, the researchers noted.

Despite relatively small differences and weak effect size (Cramer V scores of 0.2 or less for all), the results show a stronger recognition of emotion, compared with other studies, and highlight the importance of investigating the impact of face masks on other aspects of child development as the COVID-19 pandemic persists, the researchers concluded.

The study received no outside funding. The researchers had no relevant financial conflicts to disclose.

A majority of healthy preschoolers were able to recognize emotions shown in static pictures of adults with and without face masks, based on data from a cross-sectional study of 276 children.

Some are concerned about the effects of adults working in preschools wearing face masks on the ability of young children to learn to recognize emotions, study author Juliane Schneider, MD, of University Hospital Lausanne (Switzerland), and colleagues wrote. Previous studies using photographs of faces with digitally added masks have suggested that young children’s emotional recognition was worse with masked faces.

In the study published in JAMA Pediatrics, the researchers tested the impact of masks on the ability of preschool children to identify joy, anger, and sadness. The study included 135 girls and 141 boys aged 36-72 months with a mean age of 52.4 months. The tests were conducted at nine daycare centers.

Children were shown photographs of 15 actors (5 men and 10 women) with and without surgical face masks. The total data set included 90 pictures illustrating joy, anger, and sadness. The children were shown the pictures at random, and they could either name the emotion, point to a card with emoticons showing the three emotions, or respond “I don’t know” or “quit the experiment.” Test sessions lasted approximately 7 minutes per child. Effect sizes were calculated using X² and Cramer V tests.

Overall, 68.8% of the children correctly identified the emotion portrayed; the correct response rate was 70.6% for faces without face masks and 66.9% for those with face masks. Correct recognition of joy was significantly higher for faces without masks than for those with masks (94.8% vs. 87.3), as was correct recognition of sadness (54.1% vs. 48.9%; P < .001 for both). Recognition of anger was not significantly different for unmasked and masked faces (62.2% vs. 64.6%, P = .10).

No significant differences in correct responses appeared between boys and girls and the rate of correct responses increased significantly with age. The rates of “I don’t know,” and “quit the experiment” responses were 3.1% and 2.2%, respectively. In an analysis of incorrect responses, approximately 25% of the children confused anger and sadness, and 21% misidentified joy for images of anger or sadness.

“Overall, participants in this study, who had been exposed to face masks for nearly a year, recognized emotions on pictures better than has been reported in previous research, even with face masks,” the researchers wrote.

The study findings were limited by several factors including the use of static pictures versus real individuals, which limits generalizability, and the lack of data on children with developmental issues, the researchers noted.

Despite relatively small differences and weak effect size (Cramer V scores of 0.2 or less for all), the results show a stronger recognition of emotion, compared with other studies, and highlight the importance of investigating the impact of face masks on other aspects of child development as the COVID-19 pandemic persists, the researchers concluded.

The study received no outside funding. The researchers had no relevant financial conflicts to disclose.

A majority of healthy preschoolers were able to recognize emotions shown in static pictures of adults with and without face masks, based on data from a cross-sectional study of 276 children.

Some are concerned about the effects of adults working in preschools wearing face masks on the ability of young children to learn to recognize emotions, study author Juliane Schneider, MD, of University Hospital Lausanne (Switzerland), and colleagues wrote. Previous studies using photographs of faces with digitally added masks have suggested that young children’s emotional recognition was worse with masked faces.

In the study published in JAMA Pediatrics, the researchers tested the impact of masks on the ability of preschool children to identify joy, anger, and sadness. The study included 135 girls and 141 boys aged 36-72 months with a mean age of 52.4 months. The tests were conducted at nine daycare centers.

Children were shown photographs of 15 actors (5 men and 10 women) with and without surgical face masks. The total data set included 90 pictures illustrating joy, anger, and sadness. The children were shown the pictures at random, and they could either name the emotion, point to a card with emoticons showing the three emotions, or respond “I don’t know” or “quit the experiment.” Test sessions lasted approximately 7 minutes per child. Effect sizes were calculated using X² and Cramer V tests.

Overall, 68.8% of the children correctly identified the emotion portrayed; the correct response rate was 70.6% for faces without face masks and 66.9% for those with face masks. Correct recognition of joy was significantly higher for faces without masks than for those with masks (94.8% vs. 87.3), as was correct recognition of sadness (54.1% vs. 48.9%; P < .001 for both). Recognition of anger was not significantly different for unmasked and masked faces (62.2% vs. 64.6%, P = .10).

No significant differences in correct responses appeared between boys and girls and the rate of correct responses increased significantly with age. The rates of “I don’t know,” and “quit the experiment” responses were 3.1% and 2.2%, respectively. In an analysis of incorrect responses, approximately 25% of the children confused anger and sadness, and 21% misidentified joy for images of anger or sadness.

“Overall, participants in this study, who had been exposed to face masks for nearly a year, recognized emotions on pictures better than has been reported in previous research, even with face masks,” the researchers wrote.

The study findings were limited by several factors including the use of static pictures versus real individuals, which limits generalizability, and the lack of data on children with developmental issues, the researchers noted.

Despite relatively small differences and weak effect size (Cramer V scores of 0.2 or less for all), the results show a stronger recognition of emotion, compared with other studies, and highlight the importance of investigating the impact of face masks on other aspects of child development as the COVID-19 pandemic persists, the researchers concluded.

The study received no outside funding. The researchers had no relevant financial conflicts to disclose.

COVID-19 has been difficult for parents trying to balance careers, home life, and keeping their loved ones safe. A new study indicates that, not only are physicians not immune to these stressors, but the long-term effects could be devastating for health care overall.

Juanmonino/Getty Images

In a study published Nov. 11, 2021, in JAMA Network Open , researchers found that stresses to work/life balance and family life caused by the pandemic have differed among men and women physicians. Women physicians have borne more of the burden, and the consequences could reach far beyond home.

Physicians and other health care workers have been at the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic, and their work lives have been the focus of a lot of attention in the media and by researchers. Their family lives, not so much. But physicians have families, and the pandemic has upended almost everything about their lives, particularly where work life and home life intersect. School and day care closures, working from home, working extra hours, or working less – all of these changes have consequences on family life and the mental health of parents who are also physicians.

Findings from a Medscape survey published in early 2021 indicate that more female physicians than male physicians were either “conflicted” or “very conflicted” as parents because of work demands (42% vs. 23%) nearly 6 months into the pandemic.

In the current study, researchers from the University of Michigan, Harvard University, and the Medical University of South Carolina teamed up to investigate gender differences in how work/family factors affected the mental health of early-career physician parents in the United States during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The results suggest that the pandemic has increased gender disparity and added disproportionately to the burden of female physicians.
 

Managing the household falls mostly on moms

Participants were physicians enrolled in the Intern Health Study, a longitudinal study that regularly surveys medical interns in the United States to assess stress and mood. When researchers compared survey results from before the onset of the pandemic (2018) with later results (2020), they found a striking gender difference in how the pandemic has changed family and work duties for physicians.

The authors of the study pointed out that previous research had found that female physicians take on a greater share of household and childcare duties than male physicians. The current study found that their share had increased with the pandemic. Physician moms are now 30 times more likely to be in charge of these tasks than physician dads.

In families in which both parents were physicians, none of the men said they took the primary role in managing the extra demands caused by the pandemic. In addition, women were twice as likely as men to work primarily from home and to work reduced hours.

The extra stress seems to be taking a toll on women physicians. In the 2020 survey, physician mothers had higher scores for anxiety and depression symptoms, compared with men. Notably, the 2018 survey did not show a significant difference in depression scores between men and women. Nor were there significant differences in depression and anxiety scores between women and men who were not parents or in reports of work/family conflict before and after the pandemic.

In general, the results indicate that the pandemic has only widened the gender gap between women and men physicians when it comes to managing family life and dealing with the stresses of maintaining a suitable work-life balance.
 

‘Long-term repercussions’ for gender equity in medicine

Although these are serious problems for women physicians and their families, the effects go beyond the home and beyond individuals. Even before the pandemic, women in medicine struggled for parity in career advancement and opportunities as well as in pay, and this new setback could make those challenges even greater.

“Even short-term adjustments can have serious long-term repercussions as they may lead to lower earnings and negatively impact opportunities for promotion, further exacerbating gender inequalities in compensation and advancement,” the study’s authors wrote.

The potential damage extends to the entire profession and the health care system itself. The profession is already struggling to retain young female physicians, and this situation is likely to make that problem worse and have long-term consequences. Citing data showing that female physicians spend more time with patients and that their patients may have better outcomes, the authors wrote that the consequences of losing more early-career female physicians “could be devastating to the U.S. health care system, particularly in the context of a global pandemic and an impending physician shortage.”

The sample size was small (276 U.S. physicians), and the study relied on self-reported data. The findings suggest that more research on this topic is needed, especially research that includes other demographic factors, such as sexual orientation and ethnicity. The authors recommend that institutional and public policymakers take into account the effects of the pandemic on physician mothers to ensure that recent gains in gender equity for women physicians do not fall victim to COVID-19.

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

COVID-19 has been difficult for parents trying to balance careers, home life, and keeping their loved ones safe. A new study indicates that, not only are physicians not immune to these stressors, but the long-term effects could be devastating for health care overall.

Juanmonino/Getty Images

In a study published Nov. 11, 2021, in JAMA Network Open , researchers found that stresses to work/life balance and family life caused by the pandemic have differed among men and women physicians. Women physicians have borne more of the burden, and the consequences could reach far beyond home.

Physicians and other health care workers have been at the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic, and their work lives have been the focus of a lot of attention in the media and by researchers. Their family lives, not so much. But physicians have families, and the pandemic has upended almost everything about their lives, particularly where work life and home life intersect. School and day care closures, working from home, working extra hours, or working less – all of these changes have consequences on family life and the mental health of parents who are also physicians.

Findings from a Medscape survey published in early 2021 indicate that more female physicians than male physicians were either “conflicted” or “very conflicted” as parents because of work demands (42% vs. 23%) nearly 6 months into the pandemic.

In the current study, researchers from the University of Michigan, Harvard University, and the Medical University of South Carolina teamed up to investigate gender differences in how work/family factors affected the mental health of early-career physician parents in the United States during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The results suggest that the pandemic has increased gender disparity and added disproportionately to the burden of female physicians.
 

Managing the household falls mostly on moms

Participants were physicians enrolled in the Intern Health Study, a longitudinal study that regularly surveys medical interns in the United States to assess stress and mood. When researchers compared survey results from before the onset of the pandemic (2018) with later results (2020), they found a striking gender difference in how the pandemic has changed family and work duties for physicians.

The authors of the study pointed out that previous research had found that female physicians take on a greater share of household and childcare duties than male physicians. The current study found that their share had increased with the pandemic. Physician moms are now 30 times more likely to be in charge of these tasks than physician dads.

In families in which both parents were physicians, none of the men said they took the primary role in managing the extra demands caused by the pandemic. In addition, women were twice as likely as men to work primarily from home and to work reduced hours.

The extra stress seems to be taking a toll on women physicians. In the 2020 survey, physician mothers had higher scores for anxiety and depression symptoms, compared with men. Notably, the 2018 survey did not show a significant difference in depression scores between men and women. Nor were there significant differences in depression and anxiety scores between women and men who were not parents or in reports of work/family conflict before and after the pandemic.

In general, the results indicate that the pandemic has only widened the gender gap between women and men physicians when it comes to managing family life and dealing with the stresses of maintaining a suitable work-life balance.
 

‘Long-term repercussions’ for gender equity in medicine

Although these are serious problems for women physicians and their families, the effects go beyond the home and beyond individuals. Even before the pandemic, women in medicine struggled for parity in career advancement and opportunities as well as in pay, and this new setback could make those challenges even greater.

“Even short-term adjustments can have serious long-term repercussions as they may lead to lower earnings and negatively impact opportunities for promotion, further exacerbating gender inequalities in compensation and advancement,” the study’s authors wrote.

The potential damage extends to the entire profession and the health care system itself. The profession is already struggling to retain young female physicians, and this situation is likely to make that problem worse and have long-term consequences. Citing data showing that female physicians spend more time with patients and that their patients may have better outcomes, the authors wrote that the consequences of losing more early-career female physicians “could be devastating to the U.S. health care system, particularly in the context of a global pandemic and an impending physician shortage.”

The sample size was small (276 U.S. physicians), and the study relied on self-reported data. The findings suggest that more research on this topic is needed, especially research that includes other demographic factors, such as sexual orientation and ethnicity. The authors recommend that institutional and public policymakers take into account the effects of the pandemic on physician mothers to ensure that recent gains in gender equity for women physicians do not fall victim to COVID-19.

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

COVID-19 has been difficult for parents trying to balance careers, home life, and keeping their loved ones safe. A new study indicates that, not only are physicians not immune to these stressors, but the long-term effects could be devastating for health care overall.

Juanmonino/Getty Images

In a study published Nov. 11, 2021, in JAMA Network Open , researchers found that stresses to work/life balance and family life caused by the pandemic have differed among men and women physicians. Women physicians have borne more of the burden, and the consequences could reach far beyond home.

Physicians and other health care workers have been at the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic, and their work lives have been the focus of a lot of attention in the media and by researchers. Their family lives, not so much. But physicians have families, and the pandemic has upended almost everything about their lives, particularly where work life and home life intersect. School and day care closures, working from home, working extra hours, or working less – all of these changes have consequences on family life and the mental health of parents who are also physicians.

Findings from a Medscape survey published in early 2021 indicate that more female physicians than male physicians were either “conflicted” or “very conflicted” as parents because of work demands (42% vs. 23%) nearly 6 months into the pandemic.

In the current study, researchers from the University of Michigan, Harvard University, and the Medical University of South Carolina teamed up to investigate gender differences in how work/family factors affected the mental health of early-career physician parents in the United States during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The results suggest that the pandemic has increased gender disparity and added disproportionately to the burden of female physicians.
 

Managing the household falls mostly on moms

Participants were physicians enrolled in the Intern Health Study, a longitudinal study that regularly surveys medical interns in the United States to assess stress and mood. When researchers compared survey results from before the onset of the pandemic (2018) with later results (2020), they found a striking gender difference in how the pandemic has changed family and work duties for physicians.

The authors of the study pointed out that previous research had found that female physicians take on a greater share of household and childcare duties than male physicians. The current study found that their share had increased with the pandemic. Physician moms are now 30 times more likely to be in charge of these tasks than physician dads.

In families in which both parents were physicians, none of the men said they took the primary role in managing the extra demands caused by the pandemic. In addition, women were twice as likely as men to work primarily from home and to work reduced hours.

The extra stress seems to be taking a toll on women physicians. In the 2020 survey, physician mothers had higher scores for anxiety and depression symptoms, compared with men. Notably, the 2018 survey did not show a significant difference in depression scores between men and women. Nor were there significant differences in depression and anxiety scores between women and men who were not parents or in reports of work/family conflict before and after the pandemic.

In general, the results indicate that the pandemic has only widened the gender gap between women and men physicians when it comes to managing family life and dealing with the stresses of maintaining a suitable work-life balance.
 

‘Long-term repercussions’ for gender equity in medicine

Although these are serious problems for women physicians and their families, the effects go beyond the home and beyond individuals. Even before the pandemic, women in medicine struggled for parity in career advancement and opportunities as well as in pay, and this new setback could make those challenges even greater.

“Even short-term adjustments can have serious long-term repercussions as they may lead to lower earnings and negatively impact opportunities for promotion, further exacerbating gender inequalities in compensation and advancement,” the study’s authors wrote.

The potential damage extends to the entire profession and the health care system itself. The profession is already struggling to retain young female physicians, and this situation is likely to make that problem worse and have long-term consequences. Citing data showing that female physicians spend more time with patients and that their patients may have better outcomes, the authors wrote that the consequences of losing more early-career female physicians “could be devastating to the U.S. health care system, particularly in the context of a global pandemic and an impending physician shortage.”

The sample size was small (276 U.S. physicians), and the study relied on self-reported data. The findings suggest that more research on this topic is needed, especially research that includes other demographic factors, such as sexual orientation and ethnicity. The authors recommend that institutional and public policymakers take into account the effects of the pandemic on physician mothers to ensure that recent gains in gender equity for women physicians do not fall victim to COVID-19.

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

When the COVID-19 pandemic engulfed the nation well over a year ago, Rebecca Hendrickson, MD, PhD, immersed herself in the shell-shocking revelations that clinicians began posting on social media. The accounts offered just a snapshot of the pandemic’s heavy psychological toll, and Dr. Hendrickson, a psychiatrist at the University of Washington in Seattle and an expert in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), wanted to know more.

xavierarnau/Getty Images

She and her colleagues devised a survey to assess the impact of several pandemic-related factors, including increased work hours, social distancing restrictions, and lack of adequate personal protective equipment.

What began as a survey of health care workers soon expanded in scope. Of the more than 600 survey respondents to date, health care workers account for about 60%, while the rest are first responders – police officers, firefighters, paramedics, and emergency medical technicians – and nonclinical personnel, such as security guards and office staff, in health care settings. The respondents range in age from 19 to 72, and hail from all regions of the country.

“Our findings were really striking,” Dr. Hendrickson said, “including very high rates of thoughts of suicide and thoughts of leaving one’s current field, which were both strongly linked to COVID-19–related occupational stress exposure.”

The distress stemmed from a multitude of factors. Among the most demoralizing: witnessing patients die in isolation and being stretched thin to provide optimal care for all patients amid an unrelenting onslaught of COVID-19 cases, she said. For some health care workers, living in the garage or basement – to avoid infecting family members with the virus – also wore on their psyches.

Of all health care workers in the study, more than three-quarters reported symptoms that fell within the clinical range for depression (76%) and anxiety (78%). More than 25% noted that they had lost a family member or close colleague to the virus.

Dr. Hendrickson, who works with military veterans at the VA Puget Sound Hospital System’s Mental Illness Research, Education, and Clinical Center and its PTSD outpatient clinic, hadn’t expected the experience of loss to be so pervasive. She said the sheer number of people who “crossed the threshold” into despair concerned her deeply.
 

Signs and symptoms of PTSD

PTSD’s prevalence among health care workers has always been variable, said Jessica Gold, MD, assistant professor and director of wellness, engagement, and outreach in the department of psychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis.

As a psychiatrist who sees health care workers in her clinical practice, Dr. Gold has noted poor baseline mental health, including depression and trauma. Significant data have pointed to a relatively higher suicide rate among physicians than among the general population. These problems have been compounded by COVID-19.

“It has been an unrelenting series of new stressors,” she said, citing lack of resources; a feeling of being unable to help; and the high frequency of risk of death to patients, family and friends, and the caregivers themselves as just as few examples. “It is very likely going to increase our baseline trauma, and honestly, I don’t know that we can predict how. To me, trauma has no real timeline and can show up months or even years after the pandemic.”

PTSD can manifest itself in health care workers in several different ways. A few commonalities Dr. Gold has observed are sleep disruption (including insomnia and nightmares), work avoidance by taking disability or quitting, irritability or other changes in mood, trouble concentrating, and hypervigilance.

She said she has seen physical manifestations of trauma – such as body pain, stomachaches, and teeth grinding, which “you might not realize are at all related to trauma but ultimately are.” Sometimes, she added, “people have panic attacks on the way to work or right when they get to work, or are thinking about work.”

Dr. Gold noted that different types of treatment, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), can be effective for PTSD. Medication is often necessary because of comorbid anxiety, depression, or eating disorders, said Dr. Gold, who is conducting a study on the pandemic’s effects on medical students.
 

The difficulties in isolating COVID-19 as a contributor

Not all researchers are convinced that a causal relationship has been established between the pandemic and worsening mental health among those in the health care sector.

With provider burnout being a long-standing concern in medicine, Ankur A. Butala, MD, assistant professor of neurology, psychiatry, and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, said he remains a bit skeptical that acute stressors during the pandemic amounted to a uniquely potent driving force that can be extrapolated and quantified in a study.

“It’s hard to interpret a chronic, rolling, ongoing trauma like COVID-19 against tools or scales developed to investigate symptoms from a singular and acute trauma, like a school shooting or a [military] firefight,” Dr. Butala said.

In addition, he noted a reluctance to generalizing results from a study in which participants were recruited via social media as opposed to research methods involving more rigorous selection protocols.

Although Dr. Hendrickson acknowledged the study’s limitations, she said her team nonetheless found strong correlations between COVID-19-related stressors and self-reported struggles in completing work-related tasks, as well as increasing thoughts of leaving one’s current field. They adjusted for previous lifetime trauma exposure, age, gender, and a personal history of contracting COVID-19.

The underlying premise of the study could be confirmed with repeated surveys over time, Dr. Butala said, as the COVID-19 pandemic evolves and the vaccination effort unfolds.

Follow-up surveys are being sent to participants every 2 weeks and every 3 months to gauge their mood, for a total follow-up period of 9 months per individual. New participants are still welcome. “We will continue to enroll as long as it seems relevant,” Dr. Hendrickson said.

Carol S. North, MD, MPE, who has added to the growing research on the pandemic’s toll on mental health, noted that because symptom scales do not provide psychiatric diagnoses, it is difficult to attribute the prevalence of psychiatric disorders to the pandemic. Dr. North is chair and professor of crisis psychiatry at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, and director of the program in trauma and disaster at VA North Texas Health Care System.

The DSM-5 criteria exclude naturally occurring illness, such as a virus (even during a pandemic) as a qualifying trauma for the diagnosis of PTSD. According to current criteria by the American Psychiatric Association, COVID-19 and the pandemic are not defined as trauma, Dr. North said, while noting that “just because it’s not trauma or PTSD does not mean that the pandemic should be discounted as not stressful; people are finding it very stressful.”

Identifying the exact source of distress would still be difficult, Dr. North said, as the pandemic has produced severe economic consequences and prolonged social isolation, as well as occurring alongside nationwide protests over racial and ethnic divisions. Studies to date haven’t effectively separated out for these stressors, making it impossible to weigh their relative impact.

Furthermore, “most of us face many other stressors in our daily lives, such as grief, losses, broken relationships, and personal failures,” she said. “All of these may contribute to psychological distress, and research is needed to determine how much was a product of the virus, other aspects of the pandemic, or unrelated life stressors.”
 

A rallying cry for new interventions

Despite such doubts, a growing number of studies are reporting that health care workers and first responders are experiencing intensified PTSD, depression, anxiety, and insomnia as a result of the pandemic, said Hrayr Pierre Attarian, MD, professor of neurology at Northwestern University, Chicago. These results should act as a rallying cry for implementing more policies tailored to prevent burnout, he said.

“What we are seeing during this terrible pandemic is burnout on steroids,” said Dr. Attarian, medical director of Northwestern’s Center for Sleep Disorders. There are already high burnout rates, “so this should be doubly important.”

Rooting out this problem starts at the institutional level, but merely advising providers to “be well” wouldn’t make inroads. “There needs to be fluid dialogue between health care workers and the leadership,” he said.

Among his proposed remedies: Access to confidential and free mental health resources, increased administrative support, flexible hours, respect for work-life balance, and forgiveness for occasional errors that don’t result in harm.

“Sometimes even the perception that a mistake has been made is taken as proof of guilt,” Dr. Attarian said. “It is not conducive to wellness. Extra income does not replace a nurturing work environment.”

Furthermore, “as a profession, we must stop glorifying ‘overwork.’ We must stop wearing ‘lack of sleep’ as badge of honor,” he said. “Sleep is a biological imperative like self-preservation, hunger, and thirst. When we don’t sleep anxiety, pain, and depression get amplified. Our perception of distress is off, as is our judgment.”

The Federation of State Physician Health Programs provides a directory that physicians can use for referrals to confidential consultation or treatment.

Christopher Bundy, MD, MPH, executive medical director of Washington Physicians Health Program in Seattle, has been following Dr. Hendrickson’s longitudinal study with keen interest. As president of the Federation of State Physician Health Programs, he hopes to translate the findings into practice.

“Obviously, the COVID-19 pandemic has been a ‘black swan’ in terms of workforce sustainability issues,” Dr. Bundy said, citing “high rates of burnout, disillusionment, and dissatisfaction.” He sees some similarities with his former role in treating war veterans.

“The invisible wounds of combat, the psychological scars don’t really become apparent until after you’re out of the war zone,” said Dr. Bundy, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Washington.

Likewise, he expects the “emotional chickens will come home to roost as the pandemic subsides.” Until then, “people are just focused on survival, and in doing their jobs and protecting their patients.” Eventually, “their own wounds inside the pandemic will take hold.”
 

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

When the COVID-19 pandemic engulfed the nation well over a year ago, Rebecca Hendrickson, MD, PhD, immersed herself in the shell-shocking revelations that clinicians began posting on social media. The accounts offered just a snapshot of the pandemic’s heavy psychological toll, and Dr. Hendrickson, a psychiatrist at the University of Washington in Seattle and an expert in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), wanted to know more.

xavierarnau/Getty Images

She and her colleagues devised a survey to assess the impact of several pandemic-related factors, including increased work hours, social distancing restrictions, and lack of adequate personal protective equipment.

What began as a survey of health care workers soon expanded in scope. Of the more than 600 survey respondents to date, health care workers account for about 60%, while the rest are first responders – police officers, firefighters, paramedics, and emergency medical technicians – and nonclinical personnel, such as security guards and office staff, in health care settings. The respondents range in age from 19 to 72, and hail from all regions of the country.

“Our findings were really striking,” Dr. Hendrickson said, “including very high rates of thoughts of suicide and thoughts of leaving one’s current field, which were both strongly linked to COVID-19–related occupational stress exposure.”

The distress stemmed from a multitude of factors. Among the most demoralizing: witnessing patients die in isolation and being stretched thin to provide optimal care for all patients amid an unrelenting onslaught of COVID-19 cases, she said. For some health care workers, living in the garage or basement – to avoid infecting family members with the virus – also wore on their psyches.

Of all health care workers in the study, more than three-quarters reported symptoms that fell within the clinical range for depression (76%) and anxiety (78%). More than 25% noted that they had lost a family member or close colleague to the virus.

Dr. Hendrickson, who works with military veterans at the VA Puget Sound Hospital System’s Mental Illness Research, Education, and Clinical Center and its PTSD outpatient clinic, hadn’t expected the experience of loss to be so pervasive. She said the sheer number of people who “crossed the threshold” into despair concerned her deeply.
 

Signs and symptoms of PTSD

PTSD’s prevalence among health care workers has always been variable, said Jessica Gold, MD, assistant professor and director of wellness, engagement, and outreach in the department of psychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis.

As a psychiatrist who sees health care workers in her clinical practice, Dr. Gold has noted poor baseline mental health, including depression and trauma. Significant data have pointed to a relatively higher suicide rate among physicians than among the general population. These problems have been compounded by COVID-19.

“It has been an unrelenting series of new stressors,” she said, citing lack of resources; a feeling of being unable to help; and the high frequency of risk of death to patients, family and friends, and the caregivers themselves as just as few examples. “It is very likely going to increase our baseline trauma, and honestly, I don’t know that we can predict how. To me, trauma has no real timeline and can show up months or even years after the pandemic.”

PTSD can manifest itself in health care workers in several different ways. A few commonalities Dr. Gold has observed are sleep disruption (including insomnia and nightmares), work avoidance by taking disability or quitting, irritability or other changes in mood, trouble concentrating, and hypervigilance.

She said she has seen physical manifestations of trauma – such as body pain, stomachaches, and teeth grinding, which “you might not realize are at all related to trauma but ultimately are.” Sometimes, she added, “people have panic attacks on the way to work or right when they get to work, or are thinking about work.”

Dr. Gold noted that different types of treatment, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), can be effective for PTSD. Medication is often necessary because of comorbid anxiety, depression, or eating disorders, said Dr. Gold, who is conducting a study on the pandemic’s effects on medical students.
 

The difficulties in isolating COVID-19 as a contributor

Not all researchers are convinced that a causal relationship has been established between the pandemic and worsening mental health among those in the health care sector.

With provider burnout being a long-standing concern in medicine, Ankur A. Butala, MD, assistant professor of neurology, psychiatry, and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, said he remains a bit skeptical that acute stressors during the pandemic amounted to a uniquely potent driving force that can be extrapolated and quantified in a study.

“It’s hard to interpret a chronic, rolling, ongoing trauma like COVID-19 against tools or scales developed to investigate symptoms from a singular and acute trauma, like a school shooting or a [military] firefight,” Dr. Butala said.

In addition, he noted a reluctance to generalizing results from a study in which participants were recruited via social media as opposed to research methods involving more rigorous selection protocols.

Although Dr. Hendrickson acknowledged the study’s limitations, she said her team nonetheless found strong correlations between COVID-19-related stressors and self-reported struggles in completing work-related tasks, as well as increasing thoughts of leaving one’s current field. They adjusted for previous lifetime trauma exposure, age, gender, and a personal history of contracting COVID-19.

The underlying premise of the study could be confirmed with repeated surveys over time, Dr. Butala said, as the COVID-19 pandemic evolves and the vaccination effort unfolds.

Follow-up surveys are being sent to participants every 2 weeks and every 3 months to gauge their mood, for a total follow-up period of 9 months per individual. New participants are still welcome. “We will continue to enroll as long as it seems relevant,” Dr. Hendrickson said.

Carol S. North, MD, MPE, who has added to the growing research on the pandemic’s toll on mental health, noted that because symptom scales do not provide psychiatric diagnoses, it is difficult to attribute the prevalence of psychiatric disorders to the pandemic. Dr. North is chair and professor of crisis psychiatry at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, and director of the program in trauma and disaster at VA North Texas Health Care System.

The DSM-5 criteria exclude naturally occurring illness, such as a virus (even during a pandemic) as a qualifying trauma for the diagnosis of PTSD. According to current criteria by the American Psychiatric Association, COVID-19 and the pandemic are not defined as trauma, Dr. North said, while noting that “just because it’s not trauma or PTSD does not mean that the pandemic should be discounted as not stressful; people are finding it very stressful.”

Identifying the exact source of distress would still be difficult, Dr. North said, as the pandemic has produced severe economic consequences and prolonged social isolation, as well as occurring alongside nationwide protests over racial and ethnic divisions. Studies to date haven’t effectively separated out for these stressors, making it impossible to weigh their relative impact.

Furthermore, “most of us face many other stressors in our daily lives, such as grief, losses, broken relationships, and personal failures,” she said. “All of these may contribute to psychological distress, and research is needed to determine how much was a product of the virus, other aspects of the pandemic, or unrelated life stressors.”
 

A rallying cry for new interventions

Despite such doubts, a growing number of studies are reporting that health care workers and first responders are experiencing intensified PTSD, depression, anxiety, and insomnia as a result of the pandemic, said Hrayr Pierre Attarian, MD, professor of neurology at Northwestern University, Chicago. These results should act as a rallying cry for implementing more policies tailored to prevent burnout, he said.

“What we are seeing during this terrible pandemic is burnout on steroids,” said Dr. Attarian, medical director of Northwestern’s Center for Sleep Disorders. There are already high burnout rates, “so this should be doubly important.”

Rooting out this problem starts at the institutional level, but merely advising providers to “be well” wouldn’t make inroads. “There needs to be fluid dialogue between health care workers and the leadership,” he said.

Among his proposed remedies: Access to confidential and free mental health resources, increased administrative support, flexible hours, respect for work-life balance, and forgiveness for occasional errors that don’t result in harm.

“Sometimes even the perception that a mistake has been made is taken as proof of guilt,” Dr. Attarian said. “It is not conducive to wellness. Extra income does not replace a nurturing work environment.”

Furthermore, “as a profession, we must stop glorifying ‘overwork.’ We must stop wearing ‘lack of sleep’ as badge of honor,” he said. “Sleep is a biological imperative like self-preservation, hunger, and thirst. When we don’t sleep anxiety, pain, and depression get amplified. Our perception of distress is off, as is our judgment.”

The Federation of State Physician Health Programs provides a directory that physicians can use for referrals to confidential consultation or treatment.

Christopher Bundy, MD, MPH, executive medical director of Washington Physicians Health Program in Seattle, has been following Dr. Hendrickson’s longitudinal study with keen interest. As president of the Federation of State Physician Health Programs, he hopes to translate the findings into practice.

“Obviously, the COVID-19 pandemic has been a ‘black swan’ in terms of workforce sustainability issues,” Dr. Bundy said, citing “high rates of burnout, disillusionment, and dissatisfaction.” He sees some similarities with his former role in treating war veterans.

“The invisible wounds of combat, the psychological scars don’t really become apparent until after you’re out of the war zone,” said Dr. Bundy, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Washington.

Likewise, he expects the “emotional chickens will come home to roost as the pandemic subsides.” Until then, “people are just focused on survival, and in doing their jobs and protecting their patients.” Eventually, “their own wounds inside the pandemic will take hold.”
 

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

When the COVID-19 pandemic engulfed the nation well over a year ago, Rebecca Hendrickson, MD, PhD, immersed herself in the shell-shocking revelations that clinicians began posting on social media. The accounts offered just a snapshot of the pandemic’s heavy psychological toll, and Dr. Hendrickson, a psychiatrist at the University of Washington in Seattle and an expert in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), wanted to know more.

xavierarnau/Getty Images

She and her colleagues devised a survey to assess the impact of several pandemic-related factors, including increased work hours, social distancing restrictions, and lack of adequate personal protective equipment.

What began as a survey of health care workers soon expanded in scope. Of the more than 600 survey respondents to date, health care workers account for about 60%, while the rest are first responders – police officers, firefighters, paramedics, and emergency medical technicians – and nonclinical personnel, such as security guards and office staff, in health care settings. The respondents range in age from 19 to 72, and hail from all regions of the country.

“Our findings were really striking,” Dr. Hendrickson said, “including very high rates of thoughts of suicide and thoughts of leaving one’s current field, which were both strongly linked to COVID-19–related occupational stress exposure.”

The distress stemmed from a multitude of factors. Among the most demoralizing: witnessing patients die in isolation and being stretched thin to provide optimal care for all patients amid an unrelenting onslaught of COVID-19 cases, she said. For some health care workers, living in the garage or basement – to avoid infecting family members with the virus – also wore on their psyches.

Of all health care workers in the study, more than three-quarters reported symptoms that fell within the clinical range for depression (76%) and anxiety (78%). More than 25% noted that they had lost a family member or close colleague to the virus.

Dr. Hendrickson, who works with military veterans at the VA Puget Sound Hospital System’s Mental Illness Research, Education, and Clinical Center and its PTSD outpatient clinic, hadn’t expected the experience of loss to be so pervasive. She said the sheer number of people who “crossed the threshold” into despair concerned her deeply.
 

Signs and symptoms of PTSD

PTSD’s prevalence among health care workers has always been variable, said Jessica Gold, MD, assistant professor and director of wellness, engagement, and outreach in the department of psychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis.

As a psychiatrist who sees health care workers in her clinical practice, Dr. Gold has noted poor baseline mental health, including depression and trauma. Significant data have pointed to a relatively higher suicide rate among physicians than among the general population. These problems have been compounded by COVID-19.

“It has been an unrelenting series of new stressors,” she said, citing lack of resources; a feeling of being unable to help; and the high frequency of risk of death to patients, family and friends, and the caregivers themselves as just as few examples. “It is very likely going to increase our baseline trauma, and honestly, I don’t know that we can predict how. To me, trauma has no real timeline and can show up months or even years after the pandemic.”

PTSD can manifest itself in health care workers in several different ways. A few commonalities Dr. Gold has observed are sleep disruption (including insomnia and nightmares), work avoidance by taking disability or quitting, irritability or other changes in mood, trouble concentrating, and hypervigilance.

She said she has seen physical manifestations of trauma – such as body pain, stomachaches, and teeth grinding, which “you might not realize are at all related to trauma but ultimately are.” Sometimes, she added, “people have panic attacks on the way to work or right when they get to work, or are thinking about work.”

Dr. Gold noted that different types of treatment, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), can be effective for PTSD. Medication is often necessary because of comorbid anxiety, depression, or eating disorders, said Dr. Gold, who is conducting a study on the pandemic’s effects on medical students.
 

The difficulties in isolating COVID-19 as a contributor

Not all researchers are convinced that a causal relationship has been established between the pandemic and worsening mental health among those in the health care sector.

With provider burnout being a long-standing concern in medicine, Ankur A. Butala, MD, assistant professor of neurology, psychiatry, and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, said he remains a bit skeptical that acute stressors during the pandemic amounted to a uniquely potent driving force that can be extrapolated and quantified in a study.

“It’s hard to interpret a chronic, rolling, ongoing trauma like COVID-19 against tools or scales developed to investigate symptoms from a singular and acute trauma, like a school shooting or a [military] firefight,” Dr. Butala said.

In addition, he noted a reluctance to generalizing results from a study in which participants were recruited via social media as opposed to research methods involving more rigorous selection protocols.

Although Dr. Hendrickson acknowledged the study’s limitations, she said her team nonetheless found strong correlations between COVID-19-related stressors and self-reported struggles in completing work-related tasks, as well as increasing thoughts of leaving one’s current field. They adjusted for previous lifetime trauma exposure, age, gender, and a personal history of contracting COVID-19.

The underlying premise of the study could be confirmed with repeated surveys over time, Dr. Butala said, as the COVID-19 pandemic evolves and the vaccination effort unfolds.

Follow-up surveys are being sent to participants every 2 weeks and every 3 months to gauge their mood, for a total follow-up period of 9 months per individual. New participants are still welcome. “We will continue to enroll as long as it seems relevant,” Dr. Hendrickson said.

Carol S. North, MD, MPE, who has added to the growing research on the pandemic’s toll on mental health, noted that because symptom scales do not provide psychiatric diagnoses, it is difficult to attribute the prevalence of psychiatric disorders to the pandemic. Dr. North is chair and professor of crisis psychiatry at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, and director of the program in trauma and disaster at VA North Texas Health Care System.

The DSM-5 criteria exclude naturally occurring illness, such as a virus (even during a pandemic) as a qualifying trauma for the diagnosis of PTSD. According to current criteria by the American Psychiatric Association, COVID-19 and the pandemic are not defined as trauma, Dr. North said, while noting that “just because it’s not trauma or PTSD does not mean that the pandemic should be discounted as not stressful; people are finding it very stressful.”

Identifying the exact source of distress would still be difficult, Dr. North said, as the pandemic has produced severe economic consequences and prolonged social isolation, as well as occurring alongside nationwide protests over racial and ethnic divisions. Studies to date haven’t effectively separated out for these stressors, making it impossible to weigh their relative impact.

Furthermore, “most of us face many other stressors in our daily lives, such as grief, losses, broken relationships, and personal failures,” she said. “All of these may contribute to psychological distress, and research is needed to determine how much was a product of the virus, other aspects of the pandemic, or unrelated life stressors.”
 

A rallying cry for new interventions

Despite such doubts, a growing number of studies are reporting that health care workers and first responders are experiencing intensified PTSD, depression, anxiety, and insomnia as a result of the pandemic, said Hrayr Pierre Attarian, MD, professor of neurology at Northwestern University, Chicago. These results should act as a rallying cry for implementing more policies tailored to prevent burnout, he said.

“What we are seeing during this terrible pandemic is burnout on steroids,” said Dr. Attarian, medical director of Northwestern’s Center for Sleep Disorders. There are already high burnout rates, “so this should be doubly important.”

Rooting out this problem starts at the institutional level, but merely advising providers to “be well” wouldn’t make inroads. “There needs to be fluid dialogue between health care workers and the leadership,” he said.

Among his proposed remedies: Access to confidential and free mental health resources, increased administrative support, flexible hours, respect for work-life balance, and forgiveness for occasional errors that don’t result in harm.

“Sometimes even the perception that a mistake has been made is taken as proof of guilt,” Dr. Attarian said. “It is not conducive to wellness. Extra income does not replace a nurturing work environment.”

Furthermore, “as a profession, we must stop glorifying ‘overwork.’ We must stop wearing ‘lack of sleep’ as badge of honor,” he said. “Sleep is a biological imperative like self-preservation, hunger, and thirst. When we don’t sleep anxiety, pain, and depression get amplified. Our perception of distress is off, as is our judgment.”

The Federation of State Physician Health Programs provides a directory that physicians can use for referrals to confidential consultation or treatment.

Christopher Bundy, MD, MPH, executive medical director of Washington Physicians Health Program in Seattle, has been following Dr. Hendrickson’s longitudinal study with keen interest. As president of the Federation of State Physician Health Programs, he hopes to translate the findings into practice.

“Obviously, the COVID-19 pandemic has been a ‘black swan’ in terms of workforce sustainability issues,” Dr. Bundy said, citing “high rates of burnout, disillusionment, and dissatisfaction.” He sees some similarities with his former role in treating war veterans.

“The invisible wounds of combat, the psychological scars don’t really become apparent until after you’re out of the war zone,” said Dr. Bundy, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Washington.

Likewise, he expects the “emotional chickens will come home to roost as the pandemic subsides.” Until then, “people are just focused on survival, and in doing their jobs and protecting their patients.” Eventually, “their own wounds inside the pandemic will take hold.”
 

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

Editor’s note: Hospitalists told us about process changes that their teams have implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Shyam Odeti, MD, SFHM

Ballad Health (Bristol, Tenn.)(Dr. Odeti was a hospitalist at Ballad Health during the period he describes below. He is currently chief of hospital medicine at Carilion Clinic, Roanoke, Va.)

Ballad Health is a 21-hospital health system serving 1.2 million population in 21 counties of rural Appalachia (northeast Tennessee, southwest Virginia, western North Carolina, and Kentucky). We saw a significant spike in COVID-19 numbers beginning in October 2020. We were at a 7.9% test positivity rate and 89 COVID-19 hospitalizations on Oct. 1, which rapidly increased to over 18% positivity rate and over 250 hospitalizations by mid-November. This alarming trend created concerns about handling the future inpatient volumes in an already strained health system.

There were some unique challenges to this region that were contributing to the increased hospitalizations. A significant part of the population we serve in this region has low health literacy, low socioeconomic status, and problems with transportation. Telehealth in an outpatient setting was rudimentary in parts of this region.

Ballad Health developed Safe At Home to identify lower-acuity COVID-19 patients and transition them to the home setting safely. This in turn would prevent their readmissions or return visits to the ED by implementing comprehensive oversight to their disease course. We achieved this through a collaborative approach of the existing teams, case management, telenurse team, primary care providers, and hospitalist-led transitional care. We leveraged the newly implemented EHR Epic and telehealth under the leadership of Ballad Health’s chief medical information officer, Dr. Mark Wilkinson.

Among the patients diagnosed with COVID-19 in ED and urgent care, low acuity cases were identified and enrolled into Safe At Home. Patients were provided with a pulse oximeter, thermometer, and incentive spirometer. They received phone calls the next 2 days from the telenurse team for a comprehensive interview, followed by daily phone calls during the first week. If no concerns were raised initially, then calls were spaced to every 3 days after that for up to 2 weeks. Any complaints or alarming symptoms would trigger a telehealth visit with primary care physicians, transitional care clinics, or a hospitalist.

The Safe At Home program was highly successful – in the past 5 months, over 1,500 patients were enrolled and hundreds of admissions were likely avoided. As we feared, the positivity rate in our region went close to 35% and inpatient COVID-19 census was over 350, with ICU utilization over 92%. If not for our innovative solution, this pandemic could have easily paralyzed health care in our region. Our patients also felt safe, as they were monitored daily and had help one call away, 24/7.

This innovation has brought solutions through technological advancements and process improvement. Safe At Home was also instrumental in breaking down silos and developing a culture of collaboration and cohesiveness among the inpatient, outpatient, and virtual teams of the health system. Lessons learned from this initiative can be easily replicated in the management of several chronic diseases to provide safe and affordable care to our patients in the comfort of their homes.
 

Vasundara Singh, MBBS

Mount Sinai West (New York)

At the onset of the pandemic in New York, our medium-sized midtown hospital used personal protective equipment briskly. One reason identified was the failure to cohort COVID-19 patients on a single floor. The other more important cause was that medicine teams in our hospital have patients scattered throughout the hospital in a nongeographic model across four different floors. Within 2 weeks, administration and hospital medicine leadership developed a geographic model. We started cohorting all COVID-19 positive patients on separate floors from negative patients. A geographic physician team model was also developed, which allowed physicians and nurses to don and doff at the entry and exit of each COVID-19 unit.

After the pandemic surge, hospital medicine and internal medicine residency program leadership made the collective decision to continue the geographic model for inpatient care. Care providers enjoyed working in a unit-based model, and noted increases in efficiency while rounding. Each of our four medicine floors has 36-40 beds, with variable occupancy. We restructured our resident teams and physician assistant teams by geography. Our outgoing chief residents led the change in May, designing a resident schedule to accommodate for a resident on each team to be available to admit and provide coverage until 8 p.m. each evening on their respective floors. The hospital medicine leadership put together a committee comprising representation of all stakeholders in this large transition of systems: attending hospitalists, physician assistants, chief residents, nurse managers, bed assignment, and administration. Since the transition and resumption of normal inpatient activity, we have encountered and addressed multiple concerns. Some notable hurdles in this transition included the high throughput on our telemetry team, movement of patients by bed board or nursing without involving the physicians in the decision, and variable nursing staffing that impacts teaching team caps because of geographic model.

This transition is very much still a work in progress, yet some benefits are already obvious. It has made bedside rounding more appealing and uncomplicated. Physicians in training learn very well at the bedside by role modeling. Greater acceptance of bedside rounding also affords the opportunity to teach physical exam skills, a dying art amongst newer generations of doctors. Another large gain is being able to involve nursing in bedside rounds, discussions, and decision-making. Finally, coordination with ancillary staff including social work and case management has become seamless as a result of having an entire floor to ourselves.

In summary, the silver lining of this pernicious pandemic at our hospital has been a transition to a geographic model for inpatient care. This is considered to be the gold standard for inpatient care across multiple health systems, and we hope to continue to refine this geographic model of care. Next steps would involve developing capabilities with flex acuity beds on each unit so that no matter what the patients need they can stay in one place.
 

Marina Farah, MD, MHA

Sound Physicians (Tacoma, Wash.)

With hospital programs in over 40 states, Sound Physicians has played an important role in the COVID-19 pandemic, treating approximately 6% of all COVID hospitalizations nationwide. To meet the needs of the crisis, Sound relied on innovation to expand coverage and improve outcomes at facilities across the country. Of one particular note, Sound Telemedicine partnered with the University of Maryland Medical System to open the state’s first COVID-only hospital. In March 2020, the UMMS needed to care for an emerging cohort of COVID-19 patients while maintaining high-quality care and minimizing exposure for non-COVID patients.

Sound collaborated with UMMS to rapidly reopen the University of Maryland Laurel Medical Center for COVID-only care, staffing the hospital with Sound’s telehospitalists. A model based on daily rounding delivered 100% by telemedicine providers and flexible staffing available 24/7 would let the program scale up or down to meet volume demands. Onsite physician support would be limited to one admitting doctor and a nocturnist. The COVID-only facility allowed a small group of doctors, nurses, and technicians to focus exclusively on an emerging disease, honing critical skills for treating COVID-19 patients.

Immediate benefits yielded big results. UMLMC’s capacity allowed UMMS to funnel COVID patients into fewer of their regional hospitals, limiting the risk of exposure. Rapid deployment got UMMS ahead of the surge, taking stress off other hospitals in the system and 24/7 telehospitalist coverage proved to be a successful long-term staffing strategy for UMLMC. Long-term benefits were recognized too. Sound’s staffing model and clinical processes significantly improved quality of care. Mortality rates dropped from 18% to 9% during the initial 60 days of the program. Vaccinations shifted COVID-19 needs, however, due to improvements in care and the flexibility offered, telemedicine remains an integral part of the UMMS’s long-term strategy
 

Emory Healthcare division of hospital medicine (Atlanta)

(Comments compiled by James Kim, MD, assistant professor in the division of hospital medicine) Ingrid Pinzon, MD, FACP Emory Johns Creek (Ga.) Hospital

When COVID-19 started, one of the things called to my attention was the disparity in education for the Hispanic population. Unfortunately, COVID showed how in our hospitals there is a lack of instructions and education in Spanish.

We started educating our Hispanic community with Facebook lives via the Latin American Association. I was also invited to the different Spanish news stations (Telemundo and Univision). I also educated this community through food drives, where I taught about the use of face masks, social distancing, and hand hygiene.

Reena Hemrajani, MD

Grady Memorial Hospital

At Grady, we transitioned our weekly educational conferences into virtual events, and this has increased our attendance, as more off-service people are likely to attend when they can log on remotely. This has also allowed us to record these sessions for later viewing by those were unable to make it in real time.

Yelena Burklin, MD, FHM

Emory University Hospital Midtown

In our Midtown group, we have started a few initiatives that we will continue post COVID. Hybrid didactic lectures have had great success with excellent attendance when our didactic sessions (lunch and learns, journal clubs, core lectures for step-down unit refresher series) have been conducted virtually.

During the pandemic’s height, when all resources were dedicated to COVID-19 patient care, there was a particular need to cognitively separate from “all things COVID” and provide additional topics to learn about, such as review of the management of different types of shock, chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, sepsis, liver cirrhosis, etc. Attendance to these non–COVID-19 sessions was just as high.

We had a number of stressful and near-death experiences that tested our resilience, professional integrity, and overall wellness. These reflections prompted us to invite psychiatrists to one of the in-person–only sessions so that an informal conversation could be afforded in a safe space. Those hospitalists who felt the need to discuss their issues further received additional support and instructions from a subspecialist.

Ray Dantes, MD

Emory University Hospital Midtown

Post COVID, we will certainly utilize a hybrid approach to the didactic sessions when patient sensitive information is not being discussed. We will also preserve the continuity in addressing wellness and resilience, particularly, when our Midtown hospitalists had to work a lot of extra hours to cover the growing need at the time of pandemic, and need to emotionally decompress post pandemic. We are also taking infection control more seriously, and not coming to work with upper respiratory infections.

Rajasree Roy, MD

Emory Saint Joseph’s Hospital

At ESJH, we initiated a telemedicine pilot for our hospitalist team in order to sustain our service given census surge and physician illness.

Sara Millwee, DNP, APRN, FNP-BC

Emory chief of advanced practice providers

To help reduce exposure to COVID, our advanced practice providers (APPs) admitted patients from the ED (as they did pre-COVID) to the hospital medicine service, but the physicians administratively signed the note/orders. Emory Healthcare bylaws specify that patients are seen by a physician within 24 hours of admission. During the pandemic, at the time of admission, the APP discussed plan of care with the physician, but the patient was only seen by the APP upon initial evaluation/admission, as opposed to the physician and APP pre-COVID. This improved productivity, and facilitated communication and collaboration between APPs and physicians. This also fostered an environment where APPs were practicing at the top of their licenses and improved job satisfaction.

Additionally, across the hospital medicine division, several APPs were utilized from other divisions to assist with admissions and cross cover. As the volume was at incredibly high levels, this improved the workload and burden of the hospital medicine providers. The displaced APPs were utilized at several facilities and worked under the guidance and supervision of hospital medicine providers. Moving forward, this has prompted leadership to look at utilizing APPs from other divisions as “PRN” providers as well.

Editor’s note: Hospitalists told us about process changes that their teams have implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Shyam Odeti, MD, SFHM

Ballad Health (Bristol, Tenn.)(Dr. Odeti was a hospitalist at Ballad Health during the period he describes below. He is currently chief of hospital medicine at Carilion Clinic, Roanoke, Va.)

Ballad Health is a 21-hospital health system serving 1.2 million population in 21 counties of rural Appalachia (northeast Tennessee, southwest Virginia, western North Carolina, and Kentucky). We saw a significant spike in COVID-19 numbers beginning in October 2020. We were at a 7.9% test positivity rate and 89 COVID-19 hospitalizations on Oct. 1, which rapidly increased to over 18% positivity rate and over 250 hospitalizations by mid-November. This alarming trend created concerns about handling the future inpatient volumes in an already strained health system.

There were some unique challenges to this region that were contributing to the increased hospitalizations. A significant part of the population we serve in this region has low health literacy, low socioeconomic status, and problems with transportation. Telehealth in an outpatient setting was rudimentary in parts of this region.

Ballad Health developed Safe At Home to identify lower-acuity COVID-19 patients and transition them to the home setting safely. This in turn would prevent their readmissions or return visits to the ED by implementing comprehensive oversight to their disease course. We achieved this through a collaborative approach of the existing teams, case management, telenurse team, primary care providers, and hospitalist-led transitional care. We leveraged the newly implemented EHR Epic and telehealth under the leadership of Ballad Health’s chief medical information officer, Dr. Mark Wilkinson.

Among the patients diagnosed with COVID-19 in ED and urgent care, low acuity cases were identified and enrolled into Safe At Home. Patients were provided with a pulse oximeter, thermometer, and incentive spirometer. They received phone calls the next 2 days from the telenurse team for a comprehensive interview, followed by daily phone calls during the first week. If no concerns were raised initially, then calls were spaced to every 3 days after that for up to 2 weeks. Any complaints or alarming symptoms would trigger a telehealth visit with primary care physicians, transitional care clinics, or a hospitalist.

The Safe At Home program was highly successful – in the past 5 months, over 1,500 patients were enrolled and hundreds of admissions were likely avoided. As we feared, the positivity rate in our region went close to 35% and inpatient COVID-19 census was over 350, with ICU utilization over 92%. If not for our innovative solution, this pandemic could have easily paralyzed health care in our region. Our patients also felt safe, as they were monitored daily and had help one call away, 24/7.

This innovation has brought solutions through technological advancements and process improvement. Safe At Home was also instrumental in breaking down silos and developing a culture of collaboration and cohesiveness among the inpatient, outpatient, and virtual teams of the health system. Lessons learned from this initiative can be easily replicated in the management of several chronic diseases to provide safe and affordable care to our patients in the comfort of their homes.
 

Vasundara Singh, MBBS

Mount Sinai West (New York)

At the onset of the pandemic in New York, our medium-sized midtown hospital used personal protective equipment briskly. One reason identified was the failure to cohort COVID-19 patients on a single floor. The other more important cause was that medicine teams in our hospital have patients scattered throughout the hospital in a nongeographic model across four different floors. Within 2 weeks, administration and hospital medicine leadership developed a geographic model. We started cohorting all COVID-19 positive patients on separate floors from negative patients. A geographic physician team model was also developed, which allowed physicians and nurses to don and doff at the entry and exit of each COVID-19 unit.

After the pandemic surge, hospital medicine and internal medicine residency program leadership made the collective decision to continue the geographic model for inpatient care. Care providers enjoyed working in a unit-based model, and noted increases in efficiency while rounding. Each of our four medicine floors has 36-40 beds, with variable occupancy. We restructured our resident teams and physician assistant teams by geography. Our outgoing chief residents led the change in May, designing a resident schedule to accommodate for a resident on each team to be available to admit and provide coverage until 8 p.m. each evening on their respective floors. The hospital medicine leadership put together a committee comprising representation of all stakeholders in this large transition of systems: attending hospitalists, physician assistants, chief residents, nurse managers, bed assignment, and administration. Since the transition and resumption of normal inpatient activity, we have encountered and addressed multiple concerns. Some notable hurdles in this transition included the high throughput on our telemetry team, movement of patients by bed board or nursing without involving the physicians in the decision, and variable nursing staffing that impacts teaching team caps because of geographic model.

This transition is very much still a work in progress, yet some benefits are already obvious. It has made bedside rounding more appealing and uncomplicated. Physicians in training learn very well at the bedside by role modeling. Greater acceptance of bedside rounding also affords the opportunity to teach physical exam skills, a dying art amongst newer generations of doctors. Another large gain is being able to involve nursing in bedside rounds, discussions, and decision-making. Finally, coordination with ancillary staff including social work and case management has become seamless as a result of having an entire floor to ourselves.

In summary, the silver lining of this pernicious pandemic at our hospital has been a transition to a geographic model for inpatient care. This is considered to be the gold standard for inpatient care across multiple health systems, and we hope to continue to refine this geographic model of care. Next steps would involve developing capabilities with flex acuity beds on each unit so that no matter what the patients need they can stay in one place.
 

Marina Farah, MD, MHA

Sound Physicians (Tacoma, Wash.)

With hospital programs in over 40 states, Sound Physicians has played an important role in the COVID-19 pandemic, treating approximately 6% of all COVID hospitalizations nationwide. To meet the needs of the crisis, Sound relied on innovation to expand coverage and improve outcomes at facilities across the country. Of one particular note, Sound Telemedicine partnered with the University of Maryland Medical System to open the state’s first COVID-only hospital. In March 2020, the UMMS needed to care for an emerging cohort of COVID-19 patients while maintaining high-quality care and minimizing exposure for non-COVID patients.

Sound collaborated with UMMS to rapidly reopen the University of Maryland Laurel Medical Center for COVID-only care, staffing the hospital with Sound’s telehospitalists. A model based on daily rounding delivered 100% by telemedicine providers and flexible staffing available 24/7 would let the program scale up or down to meet volume demands. Onsite physician support would be limited to one admitting doctor and a nocturnist. The COVID-only facility allowed a small group of doctors, nurses, and technicians to focus exclusively on an emerging disease, honing critical skills for treating COVID-19 patients.

Immediate benefits yielded big results. UMLMC’s capacity allowed UMMS to funnel COVID patients into fewer of their regional hospitals, limiting the risk of exposure. Rapid deployment got UMMS ahead of the surge, taking stress off other hospitals in the system and 24/7 telehospitalist coverage proved to be a successful long-term staffing strategy for UMLMC. Long-term benefits were recognized too. Sound’s staffing model and clinical processes significantly improved quality of care. Mortality rates dropped from 18% to 9% during the initial 60 days of the program. Vaccinations shifted COVID-19 needs, however, due to improvements in care and the flexibility offered, telemedicine remains an integral part of the UMMS’s long-term strategy
 

Emory Healthcare division of hospital medicine (Atlanta)

(Comments compiled by James Kim, MD, assistant professor in the division of hospital medicine) Ingrid Pinzon, MD, FACP Emory Johns Creek (Ga.) Hospital

When COVID-19 started, one of the things called to my attention was the disparity in education for the Hispanic population. Unfortunately, COVID showed how in our hospitals there is a lack of instructions and education in Spanish.

We started educating our Hispanic community with Facebook lives via the Latin American Association. I was also invited to the different Spanish news stations (Telemundo and Univision). I also educated this community through food drives, where I taught about the use of face masks, social distancing, and hand hygiene.

Reena Hemrajani, MD

Grady Memorial Hospital

At Grady, we transitioned our weekly educational conferences into virtual events, and this has increased our attendance, as more off-service people are likely to attend when they can log on remotely. This has also allowed us to record these sessions for later viewing by those were unable to make it in real time.

Yelena Burklin, MD, FHM

Emory University Hospital Midtown

In our Midtown group, we have started a few initiatives that we will continue post COVID. Hybrid didactic lectures have had great success with excellent attendance when our didactic sessions (lunch and learns, journal clubs, core lectures for step-down unit refresher series) have been conducted virtually.

During the pandemic’s height, when all resources were dedicated to COVID-19 patient care, there was a particular need to cognitively separate from “all things COVID” and provide additional topics to learn about, such as review of the management of different types of shock, chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, sepsis, liver cirrhosis, etc. Attendance to these non–COVID-19 sessions was just as high.

We had a number of stressful and near-death experiences that tested our resilience, professional integrity, and overall wellness. These reflections prompted us to invite psychiatrists to one of the in-person–only sessions so that an informal conversation could be afforded in a safe space. Those hospitalists who felt the need to discuss their issues further received additional support and instructions from a subspecialist.

Ray Dantes, MD

Emory University Hospital Midtown

Post COVID, we will certainly utilize a hybrid approach to the didactic sessions when patient sensitive information is not being discussed. We will also preserve the continuity in addressing wellness and resilience, particularly, when our Midtown hospitalists had to work a lot of extra hours to cover the growing need at the time of pandemic, and need to emotionally decompress post pandemic. We are also taking infection control more seriously, and not coming to work with upper respiratory infections.

Rajasree Roy, MD

Emory Saint Joseph’s Hospital

At ESJH, we initiated a telemedicine pilot for our hospitalist team in order to sustain our service given census surge and physician illness.

Sara Millwee, DNP, APRN, FNP-BC

Emory chief of advanced practice providers

To help reduce exposure to COVID, our advanced practice providers (APPs) admitted patients from the ED (as they did pre-COVID) to the hospital medicine service, but the physicians administratively signed the note/orders. Emory Healthcare bylaws specify that patients are seen by a physician within 24 hours of admission. During the pandemic, at the time of admission, the APP discussed plan of care with the physician, but the patient was only seen by the APP upon initial evaluation/admission, as opposed to the physician and APP pre-COVID. This improved productivity, and facilitated communication and collaboration between APPs and physicians. This also fostered an environment where APPs were practicing at the top of their licenses and improved job satisfaction.

Additionally, across the hospital medicine division, several APPs were utilized from other divisions to assist with admissions and cross cover. As the volume was at incredibly high levels, this improved the workload and burden of the hospital medicine providers. The displaced APPs were utilized at several facilities and worked under the guidance and supervision of hospital medicine providers. Moving forward, this has prompted leadership to look at utilizing APPs from other divisions as “PRN” providers as well.

Editor’s note: Hospitalists told us about process changes that their teams have implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Shyam Odeti, MD, SFHM

Ballad Health (Bristol, Tenn.)(Dr. Odeti was a hospitalist at Ballad Health during the period he describes below. He is currently chief of hospital medicine at Carilion Clinic, Roanoke, Va.)

Ballad Health is a 21-hospital health system serving 1.2 million population in 21 counties of rural Appalachia (northeast Tennessee, southwest Virginia, western North Carolina, and Kentucky). We saw a significant spike in COVID-19 numbers beginning in October 2020. We were at a 7.9% test positivity rate and 89 COVID-19 hospitalizations on Oct. 1, which rapidly increased to over 18% positivity rate and over 250 hospitalizations by mid-November. This alarming trend created concerns about handling the future inpatient volumes in an already strained health system.

There were some unique challenges to this region that were contributing to the increased hospitalizations. A significant part of the population we serve in this region has low health literacy, low socioeconomic status, and problems with transportation. Telehealth in an outpatient setting was rudimentary in parts of this region.

Ballad Health developed Safe At Home to identify lower-acuity COVID-19 patients and transition them to the home setting safely. This in turn would prevent their readmissions or return visits to the ED by implementing comprehensive oversight to their disease course. We achieved this through a collaborative approach of the existing teams, case management, telenurse team, primary care providers, and hospitalist-led transitional care. We leveraged the newly implemented EHR Epic and telehealth under the leadership of Ballad Health’s chief medical information officer, Dr. Mark Wilkinson.

Among the patients diagnosed with COVID-19 in ED and urgent care, low acuity cases were identified and enrolled into Safe At Home. Patients were provided with a pulse oximeter, thermometer, and incentive spirometer. They received phone calls the next 2 days from the telenurse team for a comprehensive interview, followed by daily phone calls during the first week. If no concerns were raised initially, then calls were spaced to every 3 days after that for up to 2 weeks. Any complaints or alarming symptoms would trigger a telehealth visit with primary care physicians, transitional care clinics, or a hospitalist.

The Safe At Home program was highly successful – in the past 5 months, over 1,500 patients were enrolled and hundreds of admissions were likely avoided. As we feared, the positivity rate in our region went close to 35% and inpatient COVID-19 census was over 350, with ICU utilization over 92%. If not for our innovative solution, this pandemic could have easily paralyzed health care in our region. Our patients also felt safe, as they were monitored daily and had help one call away, 24/7.

This innovation has brought solutions through technological advancements and process improvement. Safe At Home was also instrumental in breaking down silos and developing a culture of collaboration and cohesiveness among the inpatient, outpatient, and virtual teams of the health system. Lessons learned from this initiative can be easily replicated in the management of several chronic diseases to provide safe and affordable care to our patients in the comfort of their homes.
 

Vasundara Singh, MBBS

Mount Sinai West (New York)

At the onset of the pandemic in New York, our medium-sized midtown hospital used personal protective equipment briskly. One reason identified was the failure to cohort COVID-19 patients on a single floor. The other more important cause was that medicine teams in our hospital have patients scattered throughout the hospital in a nongeographic model across four different floors. Within 2 weeks, administration and hospital medicine leadership developed a geographic model. We started cohorting all COVID-19 positive patients on separate floors from negative patients. A geographic physician team model was also developed, which allowed physicians and nurses to don and doff at the entry and exit of each COVID-19 unit.

After the pandemic surge, hospital medicine and internal medicine residency program leadership made the collective decision to continue the geographic model for inpatient care. Care providers enjoyed working in a unit-based model, and noted increases in efficiency while rounding. Each of our four medicine floors has 36-40 beds, with variable occupancy. We restructured our resident teams and physician assistant teams by geography. Our outgoing chief residents led the change in May, designing a resident schedule to accommodate for a resident on each team to be available to admit and provide coverage until 8 p.m. each evening on their respective floors. The hospital medicine leadership put together a committee comprising representation of all stakeholders in this large transition of systems: attending hospitalists, physician assistants, chief residents, nurse managers, bed assignment, and administration. Since the transition and resumption of normal inpatient activity, we have encountered and addressed multiple concerns. Some notable hurdles in this transition included the high throughput on our telemetry team, movement of patients by bed board or nursing without involving the physicians in the decision, and variable nursing staffing that impacts teaching team caps because of geographic model.

This transition is very much still a work in progress, yet some benefits are already obvious. It has made bedside rounding more appealing and uncomplicated. Physicians in training learn very well at the bedside by role modeling. Greater acceptance of bedside rounding also affords the opportunity to teach physical exam skills, a dying art amongst newer generations of doctors. Another large gain is being able to involve nursing in bedside rounds, discussions, and decision-making. Finally, coordination with ancillary staff including social work and case management has become seamless as a result of having an entire floor to ourselves.

In summary, the silver lining of this pernicious pandemic at our hospital has been a transition to a geographic model for inpatient care. This is considered to be the gold standard for inpatient care across multiple health systems, and we hope to continue to refine this geographic model of care. Next steps would involve developing capabilities with flex acuity beds on each unit so that no matter what the patients need they can stay in one place.
 

Marina Farah, MD, MHA

Sound Physicians (Tacoma, Wash.)

With hospital programs in over 40 states, Sound Physicians has played an important role in the COVID-19 pandemic, treating approximately 6% of all COVID hospitalizations nationwide. To meet the needs of the crisis, Sound relied on innovation to expand coverage and improve outcomes at facilities across the country. Of one particular note, Sound Telemedicine partnered with the University of Maryland Medical System to open the state’s first COVID-only hospital. In March 2020, the UMMS needed to care for an emerging cohort of COVID-19 patients while maintaining high-quality care and minimizing exposure for non-COVID patients.

Sound collaborated with UMMS to rapidly reopen the University of Maryland Laurel Medical Center for COVID-only care, staffing the hospital with Sound’s telehospitalists. A model based on daily rounding delivered 100% by telemedicine providers and flexible staffing available 24/7 would let the program scale up or down to meet volume demands. Onsite physician support would be limited to one admitting doctor and a nocturnist. The COVID-only facility allowed a small group of doctors, nurses, and technicians to focus exclusively on an emerging disease, honing critical skills for treating COVID-19 patients.

Immediate benefits yielded big results. UMLMC’s capacity allowed UMMS to funnel COVID patients into fewer of their regional hospitals, limiting the risk of exposure. Rapid deployment got UMMS ahead of the surge, taking stress off other hospitals in the system and 24/7 telehospitalist coverage proved to be a successful long-term staffing strategy for UMLMC. Long-term benefits were recognized too. Sound’s staffing model and clinical processes significantly improved quality of care. Mortality rates dropped from 18% to 9% during the initial 60 days of the program. Vaccinations shifted COVID-19 needs, however, due to improvements in care and the flexibility offered, telemedicine remains an integral part of the UMMS’s long-term strategy
 

Emory Healthcare division of hospital medicine (Atlanta)

(Comments compiled by James Kim, MD, assistant professor in the division of hospital medicine) Ingrid Pinzon, MD, FACP Emory Johns Creek (Ga.) Hospital

When COVID-19 started, one of the things called to my attention was the disparity in education for the Hispanic population. Unfortunately, COVID showed how in our hospitals there is a lack of instructions and education in Spanish.

We started educating our Hispanic community with Facebook lives via the Latin American Association. I was also invited to the different Spanish news stations (Telemundo and Univision). I also educated this community through food drives, where I taught about the use of face masks, social distancing, and hand hygiene.

Reena Hemrajani, MD

Grady Memorial Hospital

At Grady, we transitioned our weekly educational conferences into virtual events, and this has increased our attendance, as more off-service people are likely to attend when they can log on remotely. This has also allowed us to record these sessions for later viewing by those were unable to make it in real time.

Yelena Burklin, MD, FHM

Emory University Hospital Midtown

In our Midtown group, we have started a few initiatives that we will continue post COVID. Hybrid didactic lectures have had great success with excellent attendance when our didactic sessions (lunch and learns, journal clubs, core lectures for step-down unit refresher series) have been conducted virtually.

During the pandemic’s height, when all resources were dedicated to COVID-19 patient care, there was a particular need to cognitively separate from “all things COVID” and provide additional topics to learn about, such as review of the management of different types of shock, chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, sepsis, liver cirrhosis, etc. Attendance to these non–COVID-19 sessions was just as high.

We had a number of stressful and near-death experiences that tested our resilience, professional integrity, and overall wellness. These reflections prompted us to invite psychiatrists to one of the in-person–only sessions so that an informal conversation could be afforded in a safe space. Those hospitalists who felt the need to discuss their issues further received additional support and instructions from a subspecialist.

Ray Dantes, MD

Emory University Hospital Midtown

Post COVID, we will certainly utilize a hybrid approach to the didactic sessions when patient sensitive information is not being discussed. We will also preserve the continuity in addressing wellness and resilience, particularly, when our Midtown hospitalists had to work a lot of extra hours to cover the growing need at the time of pandemic, and need to emotionally decompress post pandemic. We are also taking infection control more seriously, and not coming to work with upper respiratory infections.

Rajasree Roy, MD

Emory Saint Joseph’s Hospital

At ESJH, we initiated a telemedicine pilot for our hospitalist team in order to sustain our service given census surge and physician illness.

Sara Millwee, DNP, APRN, FNP-BC

Emory chief of advanced practice providers

To help reduce exposure to COVID, our advanced practice providers (APPs) admitted patients from the ED (as they did pre-COVID) to the hospital medicine service, but the physicians administratively signed the note/orders. Emory Healthcare bylaws specify that patients are seen by a physician within 24 hours of admission. During the pandemic, at the time of admission, the APP discussed plan of care with the physician, but the patient was only seen by the APP upon initial evaluation/admission, as opposed to the physician and APP pre-COVID. This improved productivity, and facilitated communication and collaboration between APPs and physicians. This also fostered an environment where APPs were practicing at the top of their licenses and improved job satisfaction.

Additionally, across the hospital medicine division, several APPs were utilized from other divisions to assist with admissions and cross cover. As the volume was at incredibly high levels, this improved the workload and burden of the hospital medicine providers. The displaced APPs were utilized at several facilities and worked under the guidance and supervision of hospital medicine providers. Moving forward, this has prompted leadership to look at utilizing APPs from other divisions as “PRN” providers as well.

While COVID-19 vaccine mandates have sparked lawsuits and protests, the data shows that they’re working and increasing vaccination rates.

Some organizations have reported vaccination rates that jumped from less than 50% to more than 90%, according to ABC News. Workplace mandates have especially encouraged employees who were on the fence to get a shot.

“In general, vaccine mandates work,” James Colgrove, a public health professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, told ABC News.

For decades, the United States has monitored the effectiveness of vaccine mandates in schools, he noted, which have successfully required shots against measles, mumps, and other illnesses that used to be widespread. Certain employees, such as hospital workers, must take vaccines for their jobs, he said, and those requirements have also been effective over the years.

“The more normalized it becomes, the more people [know] someone else who is vaccinated, the more people will comply,” he said. “With any vaccine, the longer it’s been around, the more people get with it.”

With the widespread and contagious nature of COVID-19, workplaces have been forced to consider vaccine mandates to protect their employees and prevent worker shortages, Dr. Colgrove said.

Some companies began to issue vaccine rules this summer as the Delta variant caused a jump in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. Major companies, including Google, Tyson Foods, United Airlines, and the Walt Disney Company, required in-person employees to get a shot. So far, the results from those mandates have been strong, ABC News reported.

For instance, Tyson announced a mandate in August, when less than half of its 140,000 employees were vaccinated. When the deadline came at the end of October, more than 60,000 additional employees had been vaccinated, and the vaccination rate was 96%.

“Has this made a difference in the health and safety of our team members? Absolutely. We’ve seen a significant decline in the number of active cases companywide,” Donnie King, CEO and president of Tyson Foods, said in a statement.

United Airlines has also shared that 99.7% of its 67,000 employees are vaccinated. Within 48 hours of announcing its mandate, the number of unvaccinated staffers fell from 593 to 320 people, ABC News reported.

Vaccine mandates appear to be working in the public sector as well. State health department officials in Washington told ABC News that the percentage of public employees who were vaccinated jumped from 49% in September to 96% by the vaccine mandate deadline in October.

Vaccination rates have also increased in New York City, where some employees in the fire, police, and sanitation departments protested the mandate. By the deadline, vaccination rates shifted from less than 75% to 82% in the fire department, 86% in the police department, and 91% of EMS personnel, ABC News reported.

Overall, vaccine mandates tend to reach groups who aren’t completely against the vaccine, medical experts told the news outlet. A small percentage of the population truly opposes the shot, and in most cases, unvaccinated people are on the fence or haven’t seen good enough messaging for it.

“When you look at vaccine resistance, the people who are the most opposed often make a very large amount of noise that is at odds with the actual numbers who are against vaccination,” Dr. Colgrove said.

A version of this article first appeared on WebMD.com.

While COVID-19 vaccine mandates have sparked lawsuits and protests, the data shows that they’re working and increasing vaccination rates.

Some organizations have reported vaccination rates that jumped from less than 50% to more than 90%, according to ABC News. Workplace mandates have especially encouraged employees who were on the fence to get a shot.

“In general, vaccine mandates work,” James Colgrove, a public health professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, told ABC News.

For decades, the United States has monitored the effectiveness of vaccine mandates in schools, he noted, which have successfully required shots against measles, mumps, and other illnesses that used to be widespread. Certain employees, such as hospital workers, must take vaccines for their jobs, he said, and those requirements have also been effective over the years.

“The more normalized it becomes, the more people [know] someone else who is vaccinated, the more people will comply,” he said. “With any vaccine, the longer it’s been around, the more people get with it.”

With the widespread and contagious nature of COVID-19, workplaces have been forced to consider vaccine mandates to protect their employees and prevent worker shortages, Dr. Colgrove said.

Some companies began to issue vaccine rules this summer as the Delta variant caused a jump in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. Major companies, including Google, Tyson Foods, United Airlines, and the Walt Disney Company, required in-person employees to get a shot. So far, the results from those mandates have been strong, ABC News reported.

For instance, Tyson announced a mandate in August, when less than half of its 140,000 employees were vaccinated. When the deadline came at the end of October, more than 60,000 additional employees had been vaccinated, and the vaccination rate was 96%.

“Has this made a difference in the health and safety of our team members? Absolutely. We’ve seen a significant decline in the number of active cases companywide,” Donnie King, CEO and president of Tyson Foods, said in a statement.

United Airlines has also shared that 99.7% of its 67,000 employees are vaccinated. Within 48 hours of announcing its mandate, the number of unvaccinated staffers fell from 593 to 320 people, ABC News reported.

Vaccine mandates appear to be working in the public sector as well. State health department officials in Washington told ABC News that the percentage of public employees who were vaccinated jumped from 49% in September to 96% by the vaccine mandate deadline in October.

Vaccination rates have also increased in New York City, where some employees in the fire, police, and sanitation departments protested the mandate. By the deadline, vaccination rates shifted from less than 75% to 82% in the fire department, 86% in the police department, and 91% of EMS personnel, ABC News reported.

Overall, vaccine mandates tend to reach groups who aren’t completely against the vaccine, medical experts told the news outlet. A small percentage of the population truly opposes the shot, and in most cases, unvaccinated people are on the fence or haven’t seen good enough messaging for it.

“When you look at vaccine resistance, the people who are the most opposed often make a very large amount of noise that is at odds with the actual numbers who are against vaccination,” Dr. Colgrove said.

A version of this article first appeared on WebMD.com.

While COVID-19 vaccine mandates have sparked lawsuits and protests, the data shows that they’re working and increasing vaccination rates.

Some organizations have reported vaccination rates that jumped from less than 50% to more than 90%, according to ABC News. Workplace mandates have especially encouraged employees who were on the fence to get a shot.

“In general, vaccine mandates work,” James Colgrove, a public health professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, told ABC News.

For decades, the United States has monitored the effectiveness of vaccine mandates in schools, he noted, which have successfully required shots against measles, mumps, and other illnesses that used to be widespread. Certain employees, such as hospital workers, must take vaccines for their jobs, he said, and those requirements have also been effective over the years.

“The more normalized it becomes, the more people [know] someone else who is vaccinated, the more people will comply,” he said. “With any vaccine, the longer it’s been around, the more people get with it.”

With the widespread and contagious nature of COVID-19, workplaces have been forced to consider vaccine mandates to protect their employees and prevent worker shortages, Dr. Colgrove said.

Some companies began to issue vaccine rules this summer as the Delta variant caused a jump in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. Major companies, including Google, Tyson Foods, United Airlines, and the Walt Disney Company, required in-person employees to get a shot. So far, the results from those mandates have been strong, ABC News reported.

For instance, Tyson announced a mandate in August, when less than half of its 140,000 employees were vaccinated. When the deadline came at the end of October, more than 60,000 additional employees had been vaccinated, and the vaccination rate was 96%.

“Has this made a difference in the health and safety of our team members? Absolutely. We’ve seen a significant decline in the number of active cases companywide,” Donnie King, CEO and president of Tyson Foods, said in a statement.

United Airlines has also shared that 99.7% of its 67,000 employees are vaccinated. Within 48 hours of announcing its mandate, the number of unvaccinated staffers fell from 593 to 320 people, ABC News reported.

Vaccine mandates appear to be working in the public sector as well. State health department officials in Washington told ABC News that the percentage of public employees who were vaccinated jumped from 49% in September to 96% by the vaccine mandate deadline in October.

Vaccination rates have also increased in New York City, where some employees in the fire, police, and sanitation departments protested the mandate. By the deadline, vaccination rates shifted from less than 75% to 82% in the fire department, 86% in the police department, and 91% of EMS personnel, ABC News reported.

Overall, vaccine mandates tend to reach groups who aren’t completely against the vaccine, medical experts told the news outlet. A small percentage of the population truly opposes the shot, and in most cases, unvaccinated people are on the fence or haven’t seen good enough messaging for it.

“When you look at vaccine resistance, the people who are the most opposed often make a very large amount of noise that is at odds with the actual numbers who are against vaccination,” Dr. Colgrove said.

A version of this article first appeared on WebMD.com.

The Department of Labor will likely need to rely on workplace whistleblowers when the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for large companies goes into effect in January.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) doesn’t have enough workplace safety inspectors to cover the nation, the Associated Press reported, so the agency will count on people within organizations to identify violations.

“There is no army of OSHA inspectors that is going to be knocking on employers’ doors or even calling them,” Debbie Berkowitz, a former OSHA chief of staff who is a fellow at Georgetown University, told the news service.

“They’re going to rely on workers and their union representatives to file complaints where the company is totally flouting the law,” she said.

Last week, OSHA published the details of the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate. Companies with more than 100 employees must require their workers to get vaccinated or undergo weekly testing. Companies that don’t comply could face fines of $14,000 for each “serious” violation. Repeat violators could face 10 times that amount.

Employees who are concerned about workplace safety, unvaccinated co-workers, or people not being tested as required may report their employers, according to Reuters.

Jim Frederick, the acting chief for OSHA, told reporters that the agency will focus on job sites “where workers need assistance to have a safe and healthy workplace.”

“That typically comes through in the form of a complaint,” he said.

OSHA has jurisdiction in 29 states, the AP reported. OSHA is tasked with addressing violations of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, which is meant to create safe workplaces, and the agency has updated its guidance about COVID-19 safety in the workplace throughout this year.

Other states, such as California and Michigan, have their own workplace safety agencies, which will have until February to adopt their own version of a vaccine mandate, according to the AP.

OSHA and state counterparts will be tasked with enforcing the mandate, and their agencies are already short-staffed. About 1,850 inspectors will oversee 130 million workers at 8 million job sites.

OSHA has encouraged workers to first report complaints to employers “if possible.” Otherwise, employees can file a confidential safety complaint with OSHA or file a case through a representative, such as a lawyer or union leader, the AP reported.

But workplace experts have voiced caution about the potential risks of reporting. Whistleblowers tend to face retaliation and OSHA can’t always offer protection in these cases.

“Technically, the law says that companies can’t retaliate against a worker for raising a health and safety issue or filing an OSHA complaint or even reporting an injury,” Ms. Berkowitz said. “But retaliation is rampant.”

OSHA has some jurisdiction to pursue employers who punish workers for reporting unsafe working conditions, the AP reported. Last month, the agency sued a luxury car dealer in Texas for firing an employee who warned co-workers about potential coronavirus hazards.

But at the same time, Ms. Berkowitz and the National Employment Law Project found that OSHA dismissed more than half of the COVID-related complaints of retaliation that it received from whistleblowers. About 2% of complaints were resolved during a 5-month period last year, according to their report.

As the vaccine mandate deadline approaches, most companies are expected to comply, experts told the AP. Some employers wanted to require the shot but didn’t want to create their own rule, and others have said they’ll follow OSHA regulations as they always do.

“Most employers, they’re law abiding,” David Michaels, a former OSHA chief who is a public health professor at George Washington University, told the AP.

“They’re trying to make sure that they meet the requirements of every law and regulation,” he said. “Now OSHA will follow up. They’ll respond to complaints. They’ll do spot checks. They’ll issue citations and fines, and they’ll make a big deal of those.”

A version of this article first appeared on WebMD.com.

The Department of Labor will likely need to rely on workplace whistleblowers when the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for large companies goes into effect in January.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) doesn’t have enough workplace safety inspectors to cover the nation, the Associated Press reported, so the agency will count on people within organizations to identify violations.

“There is no army of OSHA inspectors that is going to be knocking on employers’ doors or even calling them,” Debbie Berkowitz, a former OSHA chief of staff who is a fellow at Georgetown University, told the news service.

“They’re going to rely on workers and their union representatives to file complaints where the company is totally flouting the law,” she said.

Last week, OSHA published the details of the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate. Companies with more than 100 employees must require their workers to get vaccinated or undergo weekly testing. Companies that don’t comply could face fines of $14,000 for each “serious” violation. Repeat violators could face 10 times that amount.

Employees who are concerned about workplace safety, unvaccinated co-workers, or people not being tested as required may report their employers, according to Reuters.

Jim Frederick, the acting chief for OSHA, told reporters that the agency will focus on job sites “where workers need assistance to have a safe and healthy workplace.”

“That typically comes through in the form of a complaint,” he said.

OSHA has jurisdiction in 29 states, the AP reported. OSHA is tasked with addressing violations of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, which is meant to create safe workplaces, and the agency has updated its guidance about COVID-19 safety in the workplace throughout this year.

Other states, such as California and Michigan, have their own workplace safety agencies, which will have until February to adopt their own version of a vaccine mandate, according to the AP.

OSHA and state counterparts will be tasked with enforcing the mandate, and their agencies are already short-staffed. About 1,850 inspectors will oversee 130 million workers at 8 million job sites.

OSHA has encouraged workers to first report complaints to employers “if possible.” Otherwise, employees can file a confidential safety complaint with OSHA or file a case through a representative, such as a lawyer or union leader, the AP reported.

But workplace experts have voiced caution about the potential risks of reporting. Whistleblowers tend to face retaliation and OSHA can’t always offer protection in these cases.

“Technically, the law says that companies can’t retaliate against a worker for raising a health and safety issue or filing an OSHA complaint or even reporting an injury,” Ms. Berkowitz said. “But retaliation is rampant.”

OSHA has some jurisdiction to pursue employers who punish workers for reporting unsafe working conditions, the AP reported. Last month, the agency sued a luxury car dealer in Texas for firing an employee who warned co-workers about potential coronavirus hazards.

But at the same time, Ms. Berkowitz and the National Employment Law Project found that OSHA dismissed more than half of the COVID-related complaints of retaliation that it received from whistleblowers. About 2% of complaints were resolved during a 5-month period last year, according to their report.

As the vaccine mandate deadline approaches, most companies are expected to comply, experts told the AP. Some employers wanted to require the shot but didn’t want to create their own rule, and others have said they’ll follow OSHA regulations as they always do.

“Most employers, they’re law abiding,” David Michaels, a former OSHA chief who is a public health professor at George Washington University, told the AP.

“They’re trying to make sure that they meet the requirements of every law and regulation,” he said. “Now OSHA will follow up. They’ll respond to complaints. They’ll do spot checks. They’ll issue citations and fines, and they’ll make a big deal of those.”

A version of this article first appeared on WebMD.com.

The Department of Labor will likely need to rely on workplace whistleblowers when the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for large companies goes into effect in January.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) doesn’t have enough workplace safety inspectors to cover the nation, the Associated Press reported, so the agency will count on people within organizations to identify violations.

“There is no army of OSHA inspectors that is going to be knocking on employers’ doors or even calling them,” Debbie Berkowitz, a former OSHA chief of staff who is a fellow at Georgetown University, told the news service.

“They’re going to rely on workers and their union representatives to file complaints where the company is totally flouting the law,” she said.

Last week, OSHA published the details of the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate. Companies with more than 100 employees must require their workers to get vaccinated or undergo weekly testing. Companies that don’t comply could face fines of $14,000 for each “serious” violation. Repeat violators could face 10 times that amount.

Employees who are concerned about workplace safety, unvaccinated co-workers, or people not being tested as required may report their employers, according to Reuters.

Jim Frederick, the acting chief for OSHA, told reporters that the agency will focus on job sites “where workers need assistance to have a safe and healthy workplace.”

“That typically comes through in the form of a complaint,” he said.

OSHA has jurisdiction in 29 states, the AP reported. OSHA is tasked with addressing violations of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, which is meant to create safe workplaces, and the agency has updated its guidance about COVID-19 safety in the workplace throughout this year.

Other states, such as California and Michigan, have their own workplace safety agencies, which will have until February to adopt their own version of a vaccine mandate, according to the AP.

OSHA and state counterparts will be tasked with enforcing the mandate, and their agencies are already short-staffed. About 1,850 inspectors will oversee 130 million workers at 8 million job sites.

OSHA has encouraged workers to first report complaints to employers “if possible.” Otherwise, employees can file a confidential safety complaint with OSHA or file a case through a representative, such as a lawyer or union leader, the AP reported.

But workplace experts have voiced caution about the potential risks of reporting. Whistleblowers tend to face retaliation and OSHA can’t always offer protection in these cases.

“Technically, the law says that companies can’t retaliate against a worker for raising a health and safety issue or filing an OSHA complaint or even reporting an injury,” Ms. Berkowitz said. “But retaliation is rampant.”

OSHA has some jurisdiction to pursue employers who punish workers for reporting unsafe working conditions, the AP reported. Last month, the agency sued a luxury car dealer in Texas for firing an employee who warned co-workers about potential coronavirus hazards.

But at the same time, Ms. Berkowitz and the National Employment Law Project found that OSHA dismissed more than half of the COVID-related complaints of retaliation that it received from whistleblowers. About 2% of complaints were resolved during a 5-month period last year, according to their report.

As the vaccine mandate deadline approaches, most companies are expected to comply, experts told the AP. Some employers wanted to require the shot but didn’t want to create their own rule, and others have said they’ll follow OSHA regulations as they always do.

“Most employers, they’re law abiding,” David Michaels, a former OSHA chief who is a public health professor at George Washington University, told the AP.

“They’re trying to make sure that they meet the requirements of every law and regulation,” he said. “Now OSHA will follow up. They’ll respond to complaints. They’ll do spot checks. They’ll issue citations and fines, and they’ll make a big deal of those.”

A version of this article first appeared on WebMD.com.

Recent research suggests that some pediatric patients who develop neuropsychiatric symptoms from COVID-19 may have intrathecal antineural SARS-CoV-2 autoantibodies, which may hint at central nervous system (CNS) autoimmunity in these patients.

“Overall, these findings indicate that severe neuropsychiatric symptoms can occur in the setting of pediatric COVID-19, including patients who lack many of the cardinal systemic features,” Christopher M. Bartley, MD, PhD, of the Weill Institute for Neurosciences at the University of California, San Francisco, and colleagues wrote in their study. “These data highlight the possibility of SARS-CoV-2 neuroinvasion and/or CNS autoimmunity in pediatric patients with COVID-19 and neuropsychiatric symptoms.”

In a case series published Oct. 25 in JAMA Neurology (doi: 10.1001/jamaneurol.2021.3821), Dr. Bartley and colleagues examined three pediatric patients who were infected with SARS-CoV-2 and, over a period of 5 months in 2020, were admitted to the hospital – where they received a neurology consultation for “subacute, functionally impairing behavioral changes.”

Patient 1 had a history of unspecified anxiety and depression, and was admitted for erratic behavior, paranoia-like fears, social withdrawal, and insomnia. The patient did not respond to treatment with risperidone and gabapentin, and was readmitted soon after discharge, then treated with olanzapine followed by a transition to valproate and lorazepam. It was found the patient had cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) abnormalities in the form of elevated protein levels, and an elevated IgG index, and was given intravenous immunoglobulin followed by IV methylprednisolone. While symptoms such as paranoia improved and the patient was able to better organize thoughts after 5 days, other symptoms such as delusions and hyperreflexia persisted for at least 1 month before resolving, and some symptoms, such as lability, did not resolve before discharge.

Patient 2 had a history of motor tics and anxiety, but showed signs of insomnia, mood lability, impaired concentration, difficulty finding words, and problems completing homework following a SARS-CoV-2 infection. The patient’s father previously had been diagnosed with COVID-19 and the patient developed respiratory symptoms and fever; an IgG serology test later confirmed a SARS-CoV-2 infection. The patient went on to experience internal preoccupation, aggression, and suicidal ideation. The patients was treated with aripiprazole and risperidone, but did not respond, and was admitted to the hospital. As with patient 1, patient 2 had CSF abnormalities in the form of elevated protein levels, and responded to IV methylprednisolone, with working memory and bradyphrenia improving. However, the patient developed insomnia, extreme anxiety, suicidal ideation, aggression, and sadness after discharge, and was readmitted. The patient was treated with IV immunoglobulin, and discharged with quetiapine and lithium.

“Six months later, although improved from initial presentation, the patient required academic accommodations and continued to endorse forgetfulness and attention difficulties. The patient’s chronic tics and anxiety were unchanged,” Dr. Bartley and colleagues wrote.

Patient 3 had no psychiatric history but started to demonstrate “odd behavior, including repetitive behaviors, anorexia, and insomnia” following a SARS-CoV-2 infection. After being hospitalized, the patient showed signs of “ideomotor apraxia, abulia, disorganized behavior, agitation, and diffusely brisk reflexes” and had a high white blood cell count, creatine kinase level, and C-reactive protein level. CSF was also abnormal for this patient, with three unique oligoclonal bands identified. The patient was treated with lorazepam and olanzapine, did not receive immunotherapy, and was discharged without psychiatric medications after 4 days.

When the researchers performed testing on each of the three patients, they found intrathecal anti–SARS-CoV-2 IgG and immunostained mouse brain tissue, and “a diverse set of candidate autoantigens by human phage immunoprecipitation sequencing” in patient 1 and patient 2. In comparison, patient 3 “neither appreciably immunostained nor enriched candidates by human phage immunoprecipitation sequencing,” the researchers said.

“These data motivate a systematic study of humoral immunity in the CSF of pediatric patients with COVID-19 and neuropsychiatric involvement and the potential for immunotherapy in some,” Dr. Bartley and colleagues concluded.
 

Potential of CNS autoimmunity

Evan J. Kyzar, MD, PhD, a resident physician in psychiatry at New York State Psychiatric Institute in New York Presbyterian–Columbia Campus, said in an interview that the results of the case series show some pediatric patients with neuropsychiatric symptoms can have anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies after viral clearance.

“Interestingly, some of the patients in this study also had antibodies in the CSF that targeted native proteins, demonstrating that COVID-19 may lead to autoimmunity directed at the brain,” he said. “This study increases our knowledge of how COVID-19 interacts with the nervous system and how autoimmune mechanisms might be contributing to at least a portion of patients with neuropsychiatric symptoms during acute infection, and possibly even after viral clearance.”

Dr. Kyzar noted that the immunological methods in the study were “cutting-edge” and the validation exploring the immune responses was detailed, but was limited because of the small sample size.

“[T]he researchers are using similar techniques to explore psychiatric disorders such as depression and schizophrenia to determine if some patients diagnosed with these conditions may have CNS-targeting autoantibodies that contribute to their symptoms and clinical presentation,” Dr. Kyzar said. “This work has the potential to discover novel neuroimmune mechanisms contributing to neuropsychiatric disease and offer possible pathways for the discovery of new treatments.”

The authors reported financial relationships with Allen & Company, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, National Institutes of Health, Novartis, Public Health Company, Roche/Genentech, Sandler Foundation, and Takeda in the form of grants and personal fees. They reported funding and/or support from the Brain Research Foundation, Hanna H. Gray Fellowship, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, John A. Watson Scholar Program, Latinx Center of Excellence, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, and Shared Instrumentation grant. Dr. Kyzar reported no relevant financial disclosures.

Recent research suggests that some pediatric patients who develop neuropsychiatric symptoms from COVID-19 may have intrathecal antineural SARS-CoV-2 autoantibodies, which may hint at central nervous system (CNS) autoimmunity in these patients.

“Overall, these findings indicate that severe neuropsychiatric symptoms can occur in the setting of pediatric COVID-19, including patients who lack many of the cardinal systemic features,” Christopher M. Bartley, MD, PhD, of the Weill Institute for Neurosciences at the University of California, San Francisco, and colleagues wrote in their study. “These data highlight the possibility of SARS-CoV-2 neuroinvasion and/or CNS autoimmunity in pediatric patients with COVID-19 and neuropsychiatric symptoms.”

In a case series published Oct. 25 in JAMA Neurology (doi: 10.1001/jamaneurol.2021.3821), Dr. Bartley and colleagues examined three pediatric patients who were infected with SARS-CoV-2 and, over a period of 5 months in 2020, were admitted to the hospital – where they received a neurology consultation for “subacute, functionally impairing behavioral changes.”

Patient 1 had a history of unspecified anxiety and depression, and was admitted for erratic behavior, paranoia-like fears, social withdrawal, and insomnia. The patient did not respond to treatment with risperidone and gabapentin, and was readmitted soon after discharge, then treated with olanzapine followed by a transition to valproate and lorazepam. It was found the patient had cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) abnormalities in the form of elevated protein levels, and an elevated IgG index, and was given intravenous immunoglobulin followed by IV methylprednisolone. While symptoms such as paranoia improved and the patient was able to better organize thoughts after 5 days, other symptoms such as delusions and hyperreflexia persisted for at least 1 month before resolving, and some symptoms, such as lability, did not resolve before discharge.

Patient 2 had a history of motor tics and anxiety, but showed signs of insomnia, mood lability, impaired concentration, difficulty finding words, and problems completing homework following a SARS-CoV-2 infection. The patient’s father previously had been diagnosed with COVID-19 and the patient developed respiratory symptoms and fever; an IgG serology test later confirmed a SARS-CoV-2 infection. The patient went on to experience internal preoccupation, aggression, and suicidal ideation. The patients was treated with aripiprazole and risperidone, but did not respond, and was admitted to the hospital. As with patient 1, patient 2 had CSF abnormalities in the form of elevated protein levels, and responded to IV methylprednisolone, with working memory and bradyphrenia improving. However, the patient developed insomnia, extreme anxiety, suicidal ideation, aggression, and sadness after discharge, and was readmitted. The patient was treated with IV immunoglobulin, and discharged with quetiapine and lithium.

“Six months later, although improved from initial presentation, the patient required academic accommodations and continued to endorse forgetfulness and attention difficulties. The patient’s chronic tics and anxiety were unchanged,” Dr. Bartley and colleagues wrote.

Patient 3 had no psychiatric history but started to demonstrate “odd behavior, including repetitive behaviors, anorexia, and insomnia” following a SARS-CoV-2 infection. After being hospitalized, the patient showed signs of “ideomotor apraxia, abulia, disorganized behavior, agitation, and diffusely brisk reflexes” and had a high white blood cell count, creatine kinase level, and C-reactive protein level. CSF was also abnormal for this patient, with three unique oligoclonal bands identified. The patient was treated with lorazepam and olanzapine, did not receive immunotherapy, and was discharged without psychiatric medications after 4 days.

When the researchers performed testing on each of the three patients, they found intrathecal anti–SARS-CoV-2 IgG and immunostained mouse brain tissue, and “a diverse set of candidate autoantigens by human phage immunoprecipitation sequencing” in patient 1 and patient 2. In comparison, patient 3 “neither appreciably immunostained nor enriched candidates by human phage immunoprecipitation sequencing,” the researchers said.

“These data motivate a systematic study of humoral immunity in the CSF of pediatric patients with COVID-19 and neuropsychiatric involvement and the potential for immunotherapy in some,” Dr. Bartley and colleagues concluded.
 

Potential of CNS autoimmunity

Evan J. Kyzar, MD, PhD, a resident physician in psychiatry at New York State Psychiatric Institute in New York Presbyterian–Columbia Campus, said in an interview that the results of the case series show some pediatric patients with neuropsychiatric symptoms can have anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies after viral clearance.

“Interestingly, some of the patients in this study also had antibodies in the CSF that targeted native proteins, demonstrating that COVID-19 may lead to autoimmunity directed at the brain,” he said. “This study increases our knowledge of how COVID-19 interacts with the nervous system and how autoimmune mechanisms might be contributing to at least a portion of patients with neuropsychiatric symptoms during acute infection, and possibly even after viral clearance.”

Dr. Kyzar noted that the immunological methods in the study were “cutting-edge” and the validation exploring the immune responses was detailed, but was limited because of the small sample size.

“[T]he researchers are using similar techniques to explore psychiatric disorders such as depression and schizophrenia to determine if some patients diagnosed with these conditions may have CNS-targeting autoantibodies that contribute to their symptoms and clinical presentation,” Dr. Kyzar said. “This work has the potential to discover novel neuroimmune mechanisms contributing to neuropsychiatric disease and offer possible pathways for the discovery of new treatments.”

The authors reported financial relationships with Allen & Company, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, National Institutes of Health, Novartis, Public Health Company, Roche/Genentech, Sandler Foundation, and Takeda in the form of grants and personal fees. They reported funding and/or support from the Brain Research Foundation, Hanna H. Gray Fellowship, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, John A. Watson Scholar Program, Latinx Center of Excellence, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, and Shared Instrumentation grant. Dr. Kyzar reported no relevant financial disclosures.

Recent research suggests that some pediatric patients who develop neuropsychiatric symptoms from COVID-19 may have intrathecal antineural SARS-CoV-2 autoantibodies, which may hint at central nervous system (CNS) autoimmunity in these patients.

“Overall, these findings indicate that severe neuropsychiatric symptoms can occur in the setting of pediatric COVID-19, including patients who lack many of the cardinal systemic features,” Christopher M. Bartley, MD, PhD, of the Weill Institute for Neurosciences at the University of California, San Francisco, and colleagues wrote in their study. “These data highlight the possibility of SARS-CoV-2 neuroinvasion and/or CNS autoimmunity in pediatric patients with COVID-19 and neuropsychiatric symptoms.”

In a case series published Oct. 25 in JAMA Neurology (doi: 10.1001/jamaneurol.2021.3821), Dr. Bartley and colleagues examined three pediatric patients who were infected with SARS-CoV-2 and, over a period of 5 months in 2020, were admitted to the hospital – where they received a neurology consultation for “subacute, functionally impairing behavioral changes.”

Patient 1 had a history of unspecified anxiety and depression, and was admitted for erratic behavior, paranoia-like fears, social withdrawal, and insomnia. The patient did not respond to treatment with risperidone and gabapentin, and was readmitted soon after discharge, then treated with olanzapine followed by a transition to valproate and lorazepam. It was found the patient had cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) abnormalities in the form of elevated protein levels, and an elevated IgG index, and was given intravenous immunoglobulin followed by IV methylprednisolone. While symptoms such as paranoia improved and the patient was able to better organize thoughts after 5 days, other symptoms such as delusions and hyperreflexia persisted for at least 1 month before resolving, and some symptoms, such as lability, did not resolve before discharge.

Patient 2 had a history of motor tics and anxiety, but showed signs of insomnia, mood lability, impaired concentration, difficulty finding words, and problems completing homework following a SARS-CoV-2 infection. The patient’s father previously had been diagnosed with COVID-19 and the patient developed respiratory symptoms and fever; an IgG serology test later confirmed a SARS-CoV-2 infection. The patient went on to experience internal preoccupation, aggression, and suicidal ideation. The patients was treated with aripiprazole and risperidone, but did not respond, and was admitted to the hospital. As with patient 1, patient 2 had CSF abnormalities in the form of elevated protein levels, and responded to IV methylprednisolone, with working memory and bradyphrenia improving. However, the patient developed insomnia, extreme anxiety, suicidal ideation, aggression, and sadness after discharge, and was readmitted. The patient was treated with IV immunoglobulin, and discharged with quetiapine and lithium.

“Six months later, although improved from initial presentation, the patient required academic accommodations and continued to endorse forgetfulness and attention difficulties. The patient’s chronic tics and anxiety were unchanged,” Dr. Bartley and colleagues wrote.

Patient 3 had no psychiatric history but started to demonstrate “odd behavior, including repetitive behaviors, anorexia, and insomnia” following a SARS-CoV-2 infection. After being hospitalized, the patient showed signs of “ideomotor apraxia, abulia, disorganized behavior, agitation, and diffusely brisk reflexes” and had a high white blood cell count, creatine kinase level, and C-reactive protein level. CSF was also abnormal for this patient, with three unique oligoclonal bands identified. The patient was treated with lorazepam and olanzapine, did not receive immunotherapy, and was discharged without psychiatric medications after 4 days.

When the researchers performed testing on each of the three patients, they found intrathecal anti–SARS-CoV-2 IgG and immunostained mouse brain tissue, and “a diverse set of candidate autoantigens by human phage immunoprecipitation sequencing” in patient 1 and patient 2. In comparison, patient 3 “neither appreciably immunostained nor enriched candidates by human phage immunoprecipitation sequencing,” the researchers said.

“These data motivate a systematic study of humoral immunity in the CSF of pediatric patients with COVID-19 and neuropsychiatric involvement and the potential for immunotherapy in some,” Dr. Bartley and colleagues concluded.
 

Potential of CNS autoimmunity

Evan J. Kyzar, MD, PhD, a resident physician in psychiatry at New York State Psychiatric Institute in New York Presbyterian–Columbia Campus, said in an interview that the results of the case series show some pediatric patients with neuropsychiatric symptoms can have anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies after viral clearance.

“Interestingly, some of the patients in this study also had antibodies in the CSF that targeted native proteins, demonstrating that COVID-19 may lead to autoimmunity directed at the brain,” he said. “This study increases our knowledge of how COVID-19 interacts with the nervous system and how autoimmune mechanisms might be contributing to at least a portion of patients with neuropsychiatric symptoms during acute infection, and possibly even after viral clearance.”

Dr. Kyzar noted that the immunological methods in the study were “cutting-edge” and the validation exploring the immune responses was detailed, but was limited because of the small sample size.

“[T]he researchers are using similar techniques to explore psychiatric disorders such as depression and schizophrenia to determine if some patients diagnosed with these conditions may have CNS-targeting autoantibodies that contribute to their symptoms and clinical presentation,” Dr. Kyzar said. “This work has the potential to discover novel neuroimmune mechanisms contributing to neuropsychiatric disease and offer possible pathways for the discovery of new treatments.”

The authors reported financial relationships with Allen & Company, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, National Institutes of Health, Novartis, Public Health Company, Roche/Genentech, Sandler Foundation, and Takeda in the form of grants and personal fees. They reported funding and/or support from the Brain Research Foundation, Hanna H. Gray Fellowship, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, John A. Watson Scholar Program, Latinx Center of Excellence, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, and Shared Instrumentation grant. Dr. Kyzar reported no relevant financial disclosures.

Telehealth is safe and effective for the treatment of borderline personality disorder (BPD) and may even have an edge over in-person treatment, new research suggests.

Courtesy Dr. Mark Zimmerman

Investigators compared BPD outcomes with therapy delivered in person and via telemedicine and found comparable reductions in depression, anxiety, and anger symptoms as well as improved overall well-being and mental health.

The results also suggest a telehealth advantage with significantly better patient attendance vs. patients treated in-person.

“We found a large effect size of treatment in both groups, as well as comparable levels of satisfaction with treatment, symptom reduction, and improved functioning, coping ability, positive mental health, and general well-being,” study investigator Mark Zimmerman, MD, professor of psychiatry and human behavior, Brown University, Providence, R.I., said in an interview.

The study was published online Nov. 8 in the Journal of Personality Disorders.
 

‘No other option’

Most previous research investigating telehealth has occurred in outpatient, individual treatment settings and has not examined telehealth-delivered group therapy or partial hospitalization, the authors noted.

“Until the pandemic, we were delivering care in person, but when the pandemic began, because of public safety recommendations, we knew that we could no longer continue doing so,” said Dr. Zimmerman, director of the outpatient division at the partial hospital program (PHP), Rhode Island Hospital.

“In switching to a telehealth platform, we were concerned about patient safety and acceptability of delivering care in that manner, especially with patients with BPD, which is associated with impulsive behavior, self-harm, and suicidal behavior, among other problems,” he said. However “we had no other option” than to utilize a telehealth delivery mode, since the alternative was to shut down the program.

The investigators were “interested in whether or not virtual treatment in an acute intensive setting, such as a PHP, would be as safe, acceptable, and effective as in-person treatment.”

The study was part of the ongoing work of the Rhode Island Methods to Improve Diagnostic Assessment and Services.
 

Additional safety measures

Treatment, consisting of an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) treatment model – including intake assessments, individual therapy, psychiatric visits, and group therapy – was delivered by a multidisciplinary team via Zoom.

Dr. Zimmerman noted that the team implemented additional safety precautions, including having patients check in at the beginning of each day to indicate their location, not seeing patients who were out of state, and making sure all patients had a contact person.

In addition, beyond the therapist leading the group, another therapist was always available, overseeing groups and meeting one-on-one (virtually) with participants if they had been triggered by the group process and were highly distressed.

Patients were asked to complete a number of questionnaires, including the Clinically Useful Patient Satisfaction Scale (CUPSS) at the end of their intake session. The primary outcome measure was the Remission from Depression Questionnaire (RDQ-M).

The study was conducted between May 1 and Dec. 15 of 2020 and included 64 patients with BPD who were treated for the first time in the Rhode Island Hospital PHP. They were compared to 117 patients who participated in the in-person program during the same months in 2019.

Participant characteristics were similar – for example, three-quarters of the participants in both groups were female, and the mean age was 34 years.
 

‘Sea change’

Most patients in the telehealth and in-person groups reported being “very” or “extremely” satisfied with the initial evaluation (90% vs. 85.3%, c² = 0.74) and were hopeful that they would get better (85.8% vs. 82.1%, c² = 0.45).

Upon completion of the program, 100% of the in-person and 95.4% of the telehealth group indicated that they were “very” or “extremely” satisfied (c² = 4.62), and “under both telehealth and in-person treatment conditions, the patients significantly improved from admission to discharge on each of the RDQ-M subscales, with large effect sizes found for most of the subscales,” the authors reported.

There were significant differences between the groups in the average number of days of attendance and number of days missed.

A nonsignificantly higher proportion of patients completed the telehealth program, vs. the in-person program (68.8% vs. 59%, c² = 1.69).

In both programs, transfer to inpatient care and dissatisfaction-related withdrawal from the program were low (both < 2%). Notably, no patients attempted or completed suicide during treatment.

Virtual treatment is more convenient than in-person treatment, Dr. Zimmerman noted. “Some patients – generally those with medical or transportation issues – told us they otherwise would not have been able to participate [in the program] if treatment had been in person.”

He added, “My prediction is that 5 years from now, two-thirds to three-quarters of outpatient visits will be virtual because that is what the patients prefer – and although there will certainly be individuals who prefer in-person care, I think we’ve witnessed a sea change in how behavioral health care will be delivered.”
 

‘Game changer’

In an interview, Monica Carsky, PhD, clinical assistant professor of psychology in psychiatry and a senior fellow at the Personality Disorders Institute, Weill Cornell Medical College, New York, said the study has “a lot of valuable detail about how to set up a virtual PHP, which could guide any group wanting to try this.”

Dr. Carsky, who was not involved with the study, called it “a very important contribution to the research literature on efficacious treatment of BPD,” although it is not a randomized controlled trial.

“Adding more individual attention to the virtual group (e.g., having a co-host in the groups) seems as though it may be an important factor in dealing with the limitations of virtual treatment,” she noted.

However, she continued, “a limitation is that outcome assessment relied on self-administered questionnaires and did not include clinician rating scales, so the response may have been subject to the effects of social desirability bias.”

Courtesy Dr. Donald Black

Donald W. Black, MD, associate chief of staff for mental health at the Iowa City Veterans Administration Hospital, said in an interview that the pandemic has been a “game changer, as we have had to quickly adapt mental health programs to a virtual format.

“For the most part, they have been remarkably successful for a variety of conditions, and Zimmerman and colleagues now show this for BPD families,” said Dr. Black, who was not associated with the research.

No study funding was listed. The study authors, Dr. Carsky, and Dr. Black have disclosed no relevant financial relationships.
 

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

Telehealth is safe and effective for the treatment of borderline personality disorder (BPD) and may even have an edge over in-person treatment, new research suggests.

Courtesy Dr. Mark Zimmerman

Investigators compared BPD outcomes with therapy delivered in person and via telemedicine and found comparable reductions in depression, anxiety, and anger symptoms as well as improved overall well-being and mental health.

The results also suggest a telehealth advantage with significantly better patient attendance vs. patients treated in-person.

“We found a large effect size of treatment in both groups, as well as comparable levels of satisfaction with treatment, symptom reduction, and improved functioning, coping ability, positive mental health, and general well-being,” study investigator Mark Zimmerman, MD, professor of psychiatry and human behavior, Brown University, Providence, R.I., said in an interview.

The study was published online Nov. 8 in the Journal of Personality Disorders.
 

‘No other option’

Most previous research investigating telehealth has occurred in outpatient, individual treatment settings and has not examined telehealth-delivered group therapy or partial hospitalization, the authors noted.

“Until the pandemic, we were delivering care in person, but when the pandemic began, because of public safety recommendations, we knew that we could no longer continue doing so,” said Dr. Zimmerman, director of the outpatient division at the partial hospital program (PHP), Rhode Island Hospital.

“In switching to a telehealth platform, we were concerned about patient safety and acceptability of delivering care in that manner, especially with patients with BPD, which is associated with impulsive behavior, self-harm, and suicidal behavior, among other problems,” he said. However “we had no other option” than to utilize a telehealth delivery mode, since the alternative was to shut down the program.

The investigators were “interested in whether or not virtual treatment in an acute intensive setting, such as a PHP, would be as safe, acceptable, and effective as in-person treatment.”

The study was part of the ongoing work of the Rhode Island Methods to Improve Diagnostic Assessment and Services.
 

Additional safety measures

Treatment, consisting of an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) treatment model – including intake assessments, individual therapy, psychiatric visits, and group therapy – was delivered by a multidisciplinary team via Zoom.

Dr. Zimmerman noted that the team implemented additional safety precautions, including having patients check in at the beginning of each day to indicate their location, not seeing patients who were out of state, and making sure all patients had a contact person.

In addition, beyond the therapist leading the group, another therapist was always available, overseeing groups and meeting one-on-one (virtually) with participants if they had been triggered by the group process and were highly distressed.

Patients were asked to complete a number of questionnaires, including the Clinically Useful Patient Satisfaction Scale (CUPSS) at the end of their intake session. The primary outcome measure was the Remission from Depression Questionnaire (RDQ-M).

The study was conducted between May 1 and Dec. 15 of 2020 and included 64 patients with BPD who were treated for the first time in the Rhode Island Hospital PHP. They were compared to 117 patients who participated in the in-person program during the same months in 2019.

Participant characteristics were similar – for example, three-quarters of the participants in both groups were female, and the mean age was 34 years.
 

‘Sea change’

Most patients in the telehealth and in-person groups reported being “very” or “extremely” satisfied with the initial evaluation (90% vs. 85.3%, c² = 0.74) and were hopeful that they would get better (85.8% vs. 82.1%, c² = 0.45).

Upon completion of the program, 100% of the in-person and 95.4% of the telehealth group indicated that they were “very” or “extremely” satisfied (c² = 4.62), and “under both telehealth and in-person treatment conditions, the patients significantly improved from admission to discharge on each of the RDQ-M subscales, with large effect sizes found for most of the subscales,” the authors reported.

There were significant differences between the groups in the average number of days of attendance and number of days missed.

A nonsignificantly higher proportion of patients completed the telehealth program, vs. the in-person program (68.8% vs. 59%, c² = 1.69).

In both programs, transfer to inpatient care and dissatisfaction-related withdrawal from the program were low (both < 2%). Notably, no patients attempted or completed suicide during treatment.

Virtual treatment is more convenient than in-person treatment, Dr. Zimmerman noted. “Some patients – generally those with medical or transportation issues – told us they otherwise would not have been able to participate [in the program] if treatment had been in person.”

He added, “My prediction is that 5 years from now, two-thirds to three-quarters of outpatient visits will be virtual because that is what the patients prefer – and although there will certainly be individuals who prefer in-person care, I think we’ve witnessed a sea change in how behavioral health care will be delivered.”
 

‘Game changer’

In an interview, Monica Carsky, PhD, clinical assistant professor of psychology in psychiatry and a senior fellow at the Personality Disorders Institute, Weill Cornell Medical College, New York, said the study has “a lot of valuable detail about how to set up a virtual PHP, which could guide any group wanting to try this.”

Dr. Carsky, who was not involved with the study, called it “a very important contribution to the research literature on efficacious treatment of BPD,” although it is not a randomized controlled trial.

“Adding more individual attention to the virtual group (e.g., having a co-host in the groups) seems as though it may be an important factor in dealing with the limitations of virtual treatment,” she noted.

However, she continued, “a limitation is that outcome assessment relied on self-administered questionnaires and did not include clinician rating scales, so the response may have been subject to the effects of social desirability bias.”

Courtesy Dr. Donald Black

Donald W. Black, MD, associate chief of staff for mental health at the Iowa City Veterans Administration Hospital, said in an interview that the pandemic has been a “game changer, as we have had to quickly adapt mental health programs to a virtual format.

“For the most part, they have been remarkably successful for a variety of conditions, and Zimmerman and colleagues now show this for BPD families,” said Dr. Black, who was not associated with the research.

No study funding was listed. The study authors, Dr. Carsky, and Dr. Black have disclosed no relevant financial relationships.
 

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

Telehealth is safe and effective for the treatment of borderline personality disorder (BPD) and may even have an edge over in-person treatment, new research suggests.

Courtesy Dr. Mark Zimmerman

Investigators compared BPD outcomes with therapy delivered in person and via telemedicine and found comparable reductions in depression, anxiety, and anger symptoms as well as improved overall well-being and mental health.

The results also suggest a telehealth advantage with significantly better patient attendance vs. patients treated in-person.

“We found a large effect size of treatment in both groups, as well as comparable levels of satisfaction with treatment, symptom reduction, and improved functioning, coping ability, positive mental health, and general well-being,” study investigator Mark Zimmerman, MD, professor of psychiatry and human behavior, Brown University, Providence, R.I., said in an interview.

The study was published online Nov. 8 in the Journal of Personality Disorders.
 

‘No other option’

Most previous research investigating telehealth has occurred in outpatient, individual treatment settings and has not examined telehealth-delivered group therapy or partial hospitalization, the authors noted.

“Until the pandemic, we were delivering care in person, but when the pandemic began, because of public safety recommendations, we knew that we could no longer continue doing so,” said Dr. Zimmerman, director of the outpatient division at the partial hospital program (PHP), Rhode Island Hospital.

“In switching to a telehealth platform, we were concerned about patient safety and acceptability of delivering care in that manner, especially with patients with BPD, which is associated with impulsive behavior, self-harm, and suicidal behavior, among other problems,” he said. However “we had no other option” than to utilize a telehealth delivery mode, since the alternative was to shut down the program.

The investigators were “interested in whether or not virtual treatment in an acute intensive setting, such as a PHP, would be as safe, acceptable, and effective as in-person treatment.”

The study was part of the ongoing work of the Rhode Island Methods to Improve Diagnostic Assessment and Services.
 

Additional safety measures

Treatment, consisting of an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) treatment model – including intake assessments, individual therapy, psychiatric visits, and group therapy – was delivered by a multidisciplinary team via Zoom.

Dr. Zimmerman noted that the team implemented additional safety precautions, including having patients check in at the beginning of each day to indicate their location, not seeing patients who were out of state, and making sure all patients had a contact person.

In addition, beyond the therapist leading the group, another therapist was always available, overseeing groups and meeting one-on-one (virtually) with participants if they had been triggered by the group process and were highly distressed.

Patients were asked to complete a number of questionnaires, including the Clinically Useful Patient Satisfaction Scale (CUPSS) at the end of their intake session. The primary outcome measure was the Remission from Depression Questionnaire (RDQ-M).

The study was conducted between May 1 and Dec. 15 of 2020 and included 64 patients with BPD who were treated for the first time in the Rhode Island Hospital PHP. They were compared to 117 patients who participated in the in-person program during the same months in 2019.

Participant characteristics were similar – for example, three-quarters of the participants in both groups were female, and the mean age was 34 years.
 

‘Sea change’

Most patients in the telehealth and in-person groups reported being “very” or “extremely” satisfied with the initial evaluation (90% vs. 85.3%, c² = 0.74) and were hopeful that they would get better (85.8% vs. 82.1%, c² = 0.45).

Upon completion of the program, 100% of the in-person and 95.4% of the telehealth group indicated that they were “very” or “extremely” satisfied (c² = 4.62), and “under both telehealth and in-person treatment conditions, the patients significantly improved from admission to discharge on each of the RDQ-M subscales, with large effect sizes found for most of the subscales,” the authors reported.

There were significant differences between the groups in the average number of days of attendance and number of days missed.

A nonsignificantly higher proportion of patients completed the telehealth program, vs. the in-person program (68.8% vs. 59%, c² = 1.69).

In both programs, transfer to inpatient care and dissatisfaction-related withdrawal from the program were low (both < 2%). Notably, no patients attempted or completed suicide during treatment.

Virtual treatment is more convenient than in-person treatment, Dr. Zimmerman noted. “Some patients – generally those with medical or transportation issues – told us they otherwise would not have been able to participate [in the program] if treatment had been in person.”

He added, “My prediction is that 5 years from now, two-thirds to three-quarters of outpatient visits will be virtual because that is what the patients prefer – and although there will certainly be individuals who prefer in-person care, I think we’ve witnessed a sea change in how behavioral health care will be delivered.”
 

‘Game changer’

In an interview, Monica Carsky, PhD, clinical assistant professor of psychology in psychiatry and a senior fellow at the Personality Disorders Institute, Weill Cornell Medical College, New York, said the study has “a lot of valuable detail about how to set up a virtual PHP, which could guide any group wanting to try this.”

Dr. Carsky, who was not involved with the study, called it “a very important contribution to the research literature on efficacious treatment of BPD,” although it is not a randomized controlled trial.

“Adding more individual attention to the virtual group (e.g., having a co-host in the groups) seems as though it may be an important factor in dealing with the limitations of virtual treatment,” she noted.

However, she continued, “a limitation is that outcome assessment relied on self-administered questionnaires and did not include clinician rating scales, so the response may have been subject to the effects of social desirability bias.”

Courtesy Dr. Donald Black

Donald W. Black, MD, associate chief of staff for mental health at the Iowa City Veterans Administration Hospital, said in an interview that the pandemic has been a “game changer, as we have had to quickly adapt mental health programs to a virtual format.

“For the most part, they have been remarkably successful for a variety of conditions, and Zimmerman and colleagues now show this for BPD families,” said Dr. Black, who was not associated with the research.

No study funding was listed. The study authors, Dr. Carsky, and Dr. Black have disclosed no relevant financial relationships.
 

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.