Amy Edgar joins me on Leading with Health to discuss how we can better address the mental health needs of frontline healthcare workers.
Amy Edgar APRN, CRNP, FNP-C is Founder and CEO of Children’s Integrated Center for Success. She is an advanced practice nurse credentialed in both primary and behavioral health. She was also a Professor of Nursing for 11 years teaching clinical nursing. Amy unites systems thinking and integrated care delivery models in her primary care center, which focuses on children with behavioral health needs.
Highlights include:
4:15 – AE: ” The lengths that providers are going to in order to protect both patients and their loved ones are fairly extreme. Some people are choosing not to go home. So they’re finding a place that is safe, where they can stay and have very little or minimal contact with their families, to protect them.”
8:30 – AE: “There are exercises and games and simulations and all kinds of activities and that is in no way, shape or form preparing you to walk onto a unit and decide, of the 18 people in your care, who are you going to spend extra time with. Who needs to go to another unit, maybe not receiving ICU level care, because their likelihood of survival is very low.”
9:40 – AE: “What do people feel and go through when they lose 10 patients at one time? That’s fairly unprecedented outside of war and certainly outside of traditional healthcare in the United States.”
10:52 – AE: “The experience of the first wave has led to innovation and better understanding of how to operate under these conditions. And I think that, as far as treatment is concerned, there has been an increase in expertise on how to care for patients.”
18:50 – AE: “Positive messaging in the moment when you need it, that was really important. And then support would be, for someone who’s not doing well, being able to say, I’m not doing well, and I need something more.”
19:45 – AE: “The current kind of climate where frontline providers are identified as heroes and these just amazing lifesaving people – which is true, that is absolutely true – places an inordinate amount of pressure on the frontline providers to perform as heroes, to perform as lifesavers. And be kind of immune to any sort of stress or have needs themselves. And so there’s not a culture in healthcare for providers to be able to safely talk about how they are feeling and get support.”
23:30 – AE: “You do things in the moment, solve a problem and don’t have time to talk about it. But then later we go back in and say, Hey, what cool things did you do? And how do we do them again? How do we incorporate that?”
Leading with Health is hosted by Jennifer Michelle. Jennifer has a Master’s in Public Health and Epidemiology and is a certified EMT. As President of Michelle Marketing Strategies, Jennifer specializes in healthcare marketing. She is on a mission to create a healthcare system that actually cares about the patients and the providers.