Healthcare worker program launched during pandemic helped younger pros with mental health, study finds

A peer-to-peer support intervention dubbed Stress First Aid didn’t improve well-being for healthcare workers, but it did help in terms of general psychological distress and post-traumatic stress disorder in workers under the age of 30 who were employees at federal health centers.

The program could be beneficial in standard care and during public health crises in the future, authors of the JAMA Network Open report published Tuesday wrote.

The clinical trial included three groups of healthcare workers enrolled from March 2021 through July 2022 at 28 hospitals and federally qualified health centers in the United States. The sites were matched as pairs by COVID-19 burden, type and size. The researchers enacted an intervention arm and usual care arm, which included programs already in place to support the wellbeing of workers.

Site champions who were trained in the program delivered the program, also training healthcare workers at the locations. The team used psychological distress measurements to gauge worker wellbeing and psychological health levels. Investigators also used surveys before and after hte intervention to measure how well it worked.

In total, 2,077 employees at healthcare centers took part in the trial. Only 28% of surveys were completed, and more of the completed surveys came from employees at federal centers. There were 862 people, nearly 81% of them were women, at sites assigned to receive the Stress First Aid program; 1,215 people (about 78% of them women) had usual care.

Adherence to the program was better in federal centers, as 70% of them stuck with the program compared to 32% of the hospitals.

Workers who were 30 years or younger and received the intervention in federal centers had  significantly less psychological distress and posttraumatic stress disorder compared to other participants.  

It’s hard to compare findings from the trial, which was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, to nonpandemic times or in settings where a peer-to-peer support intervention is implemented over a longer period of time, the authors noted.

There weren’t other studies of this intervention, so it was hard to understand the finding that the program didn’t have a protective effect on workers. “However, it does suggest that implementing a peer-to-peer support intervention and training healthcare workers during a pandemic and within the randomized controlled trial constraints are unlikely to have a generally protective effect on healthcare workers’ wellbeing,” the authors wrote.