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UT Health providing mental health resources for front line workers

One of the sad effects of the COVID-19 pandemic is the mental toll on health care workers. UT Health is working to help those relieve workers of that stress.

TYLER, Texas — While Texas and other states continue to ease COVID-19 restrictions, many people hope to return to a sense of normalcy. 

However, some healthcare workers on the front lines may carry the stresses of the pandemic with them for years to come in the form of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

UT Health Science Center at Tyler Psychiatrist Dr. Ushimbra Buford says losing a patient brings a tremendous amount of stress for a healthcare worker.

“In this job, we're still humans. And we love to win. We love life," Buford said. "And so to have a patient die is always going to be that that question of what could I have done differently."

Buford says with visiting restrictions around COVID-19 patients, that stress can be worse.

“They have family who loves them that’s calling, worried about them. They're able to communicate the first couple of days but then during the course of their day, they start to decompensate. They're unable to communicate anymore. The family’s still calling just as much, if not even more, but they can't even come visit," Dr. Buford said. "The nursing staff is doing their best to communicate, the patient dies. Then it becomes on [the nursing staff] to call and tell them that their father, mother, brother, sister, husband wife has passed away."

Dr. Buford says at the UT Health Science Center at Tyler, they knew the potential for this extreme mental stress and have taken steps to help employees cope with these tough situations.

“We are meeting very frequently to talk about our experiences to keep people up to date to talk about these things,” Dr. Buford said. “We created, in the department of psychiatry, what we call the COVID support teams. So whenever a patient within our system gets admitted into the hospital that are either COVID positive or a person under investigation, one of our COVID support teams is notified 24 hours a day, and they are given the option of if they want us involved in terms of helping to communicate with the family, communicate with the patient and keep a close eye on our nursing staff, and our physicians to make sure that they're being supported doing this.”

In addition to these in-house measures, the UT Health Science Center at Tyler also offers support hotlines for both medical workers and the general public.

For medical workers, the number for the UT Health Science Center hotline is (903) 877-7679. For the community support hotline is (903) 877-5159.

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