Adapting mental health care after the COVID-19 outbreak: Preliminary findings from a public general hospital in Madrid (Spain).

The pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 poses a major challenge for national health systems around the globe. In these situations, healthcare centers are urged to adjust their structures to the demands of the outbreak in order to protect both the users and the workers. However, this emergency has no precedent in the recent history, and entire hospitals and clinics need further adaptations for which there is no previous evidence. This affects mental healthcare teams, which deal with the unknown psychological consequences of an overwhelming, global crisis.

Like previous pandemics (Brooks et al., 2020), the COVID-19 outbreak is compromising the mental health of exposed communities (Wang et al., 2020). Additionally, with almost one third of the world population either isolated or in quarantine, the further impact derived from this confinement shall be acknowledged too (Brooks et al., 2020). While meeting the additional pandemic-related demands (fear of contagion, end-of-life care, grief support, occupational stress, etc.), mental health teams need to follow-up their “regular” patients, who are more vulnerable to this pandemic and its emotional consequences (Yao et al., 2020). Such a task becomes extremely complex, especially in those areas more affected by the pandemic.

La Paz University Hospital is a public general hospital that provides healthcare to a catchment area of more than half a million people in Madrid (Spain), one of the regions most affected by the pandemic in the world. So far, more than 2,700 confirmed cases of SARS-CoV-2 have been attended in this hospital, which required a complete restructuring process. A few days after the outbreak, its mental health team managed to develop a COVID-19 intervention protocol that was based on its previous experience during the 2014 Ebola crisis in Madrid (Rodríguez-Vega et al., 2015) and on the reports that were coming from China (Xiang et al., 2020). After five weeks, we wanted to test if these specific actions, as well as the restrictions of in-person appointments, had disrupted the mental health patient's follow-ups.

So far this year, the team has seen roughly as many patients as it did in the same period of 2019 (2019: 5,733; 2020: 5,755). Similarly, we have registered almost the same follow-up appointments (2019: 30,073, 2020: 30,296). Community mental health centers have had almost a thousand more follow-ups this year (2019: 25,678; 2020: 26,790), even when in-person appointments stopped a month ago. This suggests that telephone follow-ups are compensating the reduction of in-person contacts. The general hospital, on the other hand, displays a 20% reduction of outpatient appointments (2019: 4,395; 2020: 3,506). However, these numbers do not include most of the pandemic-specific actions that are being implemented, such as phone calls to relatives of COVID-19 inpatients, coordination meetings, or group/individual interventions with healthcare workers.

Other European mental health teams in Italy, France, and even Spain, have also shared their experience during the outbreak. All of them agreed on the importance of teleworking, and our results suggest that it is feasible indeed. There is no doubt that this has many implications in an emergency situation like the current one, especially for those countries most affected by the pandemic. But while there is no knowing how long this outbreak will last or if there is going to be another one, teleworking probably is here to stay, at least for a few months. As many healthcare workers are saying these days, what we thought would be a 100 m sprint is actually turning into a marathon. Up to now, under the pressure of the avalanche of cases, our priority was to deliver a kind of “first aid” and to deliver it fast. But now we need to find empirical evidence that helps us put in place efficient measures for the protection of those who are the most vulnerable in this crisis.

Funding/support

None.

Previous presentation of the data

This manuscript represents the first presentation of these data.

Declaration of Competing Interest

None.