Emotional and psychological impacts on healthcare workers of disasters and other mass casualty events
Citation: Rodriguez‐Arrastia M, García‐Martín M, Villegas‐Aguilar E, et al. Emotional and psychological implications for healthcare professionals in disasters or mass casualties: A systematic review. Journal of Nursing Management. 2022;30:298-309.
Language: Abstract and full text available in EN.
Free to view: Yes.
Funding sources: The authors reported that they had no external funding for this review.
What is this? Healthcare workers experience emotional and psychological issues when dealing with disasters or other mass casualty events.
In this systematic review, the authors searched for studies of emotional and psychological implications of mass casualty events and disasters for healthcare workers. They restricted their searches to articles published in English or Spanish and did the search in February 2021. They included 12 quantitative studies and 7 qualitative studies, which were conducted in Belgium (1 study), Italy (1), Iran (1), Japan (1), The Netherlands (1), New Zealand (2), Philippines (1), Syria (1), UK (2) and USA (7).
What was found: Health problems experienced by healthcare workers after mass casualty incidents include fatigue and exhaustion, grief, helplessness, fear and frustration.
Positive emotions include commitment, satisfaction and pride of providing assistance during disasters and mass casualty incidents.
Disasters and mass casual incidents may cause healthcare workers to suppress their emotions during clinical practice.
Post-traumatic stress disorder is one of the most common issues reported by healthcare workers following a disaster or mass casualty incident.
Strategies that showed some promising results for addressing the psychological implications of disasters and mass casualty events for healthcare workers include previous training, leadership and organizational measures.
Implications: The authors of the review concluded that organizations should prevent negative emotional and psychological implications by providing support to nurses and other first responders, encouraging training among healthcare workers, and fostering resilience and flexibility to improve self-care during a disaster. They also stated that more research is needed to understand the efficacy of strategies to address the psychological implications of disasters on health professionals.
Other considerations: The authors of the review discussed their findings in the context of occupation.
This summary was prepared by Ana Pizarro, checked by Yasmeen Saeed and Cristián Mansilla, and finalized by Mike Clarke.