Caring for the Workforce of a Health System During the COVID-19 Epidemic in Brazil: Strategies of Surveillance and Expansion of Access to Care

An island of sanity during COVID-19 pandemic: Does pet attachment support buffer employees' stress due to job insecurity?

Drawing on the transactional theory of stress, the current study investigates whether employee job insecurity triggers employee behavioral strain reactions (i.e., alcohol use, marijuana use, and cigarette use) and psychological strain reactions (i.e., emotional exhaustion and depression) through stress during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, we integrate social support theory and expect the moderating role of pet attachment support in the above relationships. By collecting two-wave data from 187 employees with pets in the United States, we found that during the COVID-19 pandemic, stress mediated the relationships between job insecurity and predicted behavioral and psychological reactions. Moreover, pet attachment support buffered the relationships between stress and these behavioral and psychological strain reactions (all except cigarette use). Pet attachment support also alleviated the conditional indirect effects job insecurity had on the two types of strain reactions via stress. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of this study.

Practical Strategies and Tools for Use by Occupational and Environmental Medicine Departments During COVID-19 Pandemic Surges

OBJECTIVES

Occupational and environmental medicine (OEM) departments in healthcare institutions can be quickly overwhelmed when COVID-19 infection rates rapidly and simultaneously increase in the workforce and the patients served. Our goal is to present a detailed toolkit of practical approaches for use by front-line OEM specialists to address workforce management tasks during pandemic surges.

METHODS

Specific focus is on tasks related to employee symptom triage, exposure risk assessment, workplace contact tracing, and work restrictions.

RESULTS

Tools include strategies used by customer call centers, two decision support algorithms (exposure due to cohabitation or non-cohabitation), a color-coded employee case tracking tool, a contact tracing protocol, and documentation templates that serve as memory aids for encounters.

CONCLUSIONS

These tools are created with commonly used software. Implementation is feasible in most front-line OEM settings, including those with limited resources.

Coronavirus outbreak from early career psychiatrists' viewpoint: What we have learned so far

PURPOSE

Since the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic several million cases and more than three million deaths have been already confirmed worldwide due to COVID-19.

DESIGN AND METHODS

Early Career Psychiatrists from all over the world present an overview of what happened in their own countries and what they have learned so far by this experience in everyday clinical practice.

PRACTICE IMPLICATION

We tried to take a real time picture of this unexpected situation, drawing useful hints for now and the future.