Mental health of intensive care staff should be immediate priority

Nearly half of Intensive Care Unit (ICU) staff are likely to meet the threshold for PTSD, severe anxiety or problem drinking during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study led by UCL and King's College London researchers. The study, published in Occupational Medicine , shows the stark impact of working in critical care during the COVID-10 pandemic. The researchers found poor mental health was common in many ICU clinicians although they were more pronounced in nurses than in doctors or other healthcare professionals. Honorary Professor Kevin Fong (UCL STEaPP), a UCLH consultant and National Clinical Advisor with NHS England's Emergency Preparedness Resilience and Response team for Covid-19, who was a senior author on the paper, said: "This collaboration between KCL Institute of Psychiatry and UCL's STEaPP has proved to be a genuinely important piece work. Coping with Covid has come at enormous cost to our frontline NHS staff. I have visited intensive care units up and down the country, and spent time working with my own teams at UCLH. Covid is like nothing we've ever seen before and has seen us stretch ourselves to the very limits of what can be done.