Pandemic offers opportunities to scale up interventions for the mental health of frontline workers: Experts

CorStone in collaboration with SNEHA organised a webinar on ‘Roadmap to Resilience: Prioritising the mental health of frontline health workers’ on January 6, 2022

The webinar offered a perspective on how COVID-19 has highlighted the urgent need to address the resilience and mental wellbeing of Frontline Health Workers (FLHWs) and the opportunity to reorient the healthcare system via a resilience-based approach to better prepare FLHWs for future health crises.

Gracy Andrew, Vice President and Country Director, CorStone highlighted the need to scale up resilience skill building programmes to mitigate challenges faced by FLHWs. For instance, from December 2020 to April 2021, CorStone in collaboration with CARE India (Bihar) developed and piloted a 6 session Resilience curriculum for Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs). To date, the training has been imparted to around 400 CARE block level trainers across 14 districts of Bihar, who in turn conduct sessions with ASHAs on self-management techniques.

The CorStone-designed resilience modules thus focused on building skills such as smart listening, managing emotions, and recognising strengths and weaknesses, as well as communication and goal setting skills to help ASHAs interact effectively with beneficiaries in the field.

Dr Nayreen Daruwala, Programme Director, Prevention of Violence against Women and Children, SNEHA Mumbai highlighted that the need to introduce workshops on understanding the experiences of FLHWs has become increasingly pivotal. Virtual training sessions and workshops allow workers to express themselves while clearing the apprehensions and fears they face in the field.

Dr Aparna Joshi, Assistant Professor, Centre for Human Ecology, Tata Institute of Social Sciences said, “To train workers on psychosocial distress we conducted workshops across the country to cater psychosocial services as we realized mental health is not a standalone issue. We simultaneously engaged in material generation in different vernacular to highlight the importance of self-care that was imparted during the workshops.”

The webinar overall reiterated the widespread need to have more open conversations around mental health.