The impact of the COVID-19 crisis on health and social care staff has been profound and traumatic. The recent Covid-19 inquiry in the UK has deepened our insight into what staff withstood in the most terrifying of circumstances, and the context of uncertainty, confusion, and political hesitation within which they were required to provide care and keep their clients safe. 
 
How did they manage to persevere? What have been the personal and professional consequences? And what was it like to lead and manage healthcare services at this time, to ask staff to put themselves in danger with so few certainties and to watch them bear the pain of repeated exposure to death, dying and loss and their own sense of helplessness? What price have leaders paid for feeling torn between the need to keep the focus on caring for clients while worrying about the risks to staff? How much time have they had to process complex experiences that needed to be filed away to ensure the work got done? And what space have staff and managers had for repair or resolution? 
 
In my experience there has been very little space for recovery and over the past year of my work I have seen so many examples of what I think of as the ongoing invisible impact of Covid. By invisible I mean that often staff do not attribute their experiences (fatigue, irritation, loss of motivation, numbness, work conflict) to the fact they worked through a terrifying and traumatic experience and emerged without any recovery time to face into an onslaught of work and all the collateral damage to services caused by Covid. But this “invisibility” is the nature of trauma, experience becomes fractured, memory is disrupted, time seems lost. 
Psychological interventions can repair some of these fractures, and reconnect memories and cognitive and emotional experiences while managing the fear of being overwhelmed that swells up when we are revisiting painful memories. It’s not easy work but it can lead to relief, clarity, release of energy and greater self-compassion, and awareness and appreciation of others. 
With all this in mind I have developed an intervention for health and social care staff. It consists of an online group work webinar followed by brief individual work. The group work component is comprised of experiential exercises and theory input including presenting a model of the psychological impact of Covid that I have developed from my work and written up in the book chapter included in the Covid trail. All attenders on the webinar are then offered two sessions of follow up consultation with me within which it is possible to further process their Covid experience, release emotion, identify the resources that enabled them to survive and persevere, and plan how to sustain themselves going forward. The webinar has been highly rated by participants so far and has validated my instinct that more space is needed to process the trauma of Covid and release staff from the strain of the invisible suffering they had to suppress to ensure that their patients and organisations survived. 
Naming the cost of this experience, honouring the courage it took to persevere, and allowing staff to grieve for what has been lost is vital to their health and the health and effectiveness of the systems they work in. Often those I have worked with are grieving a past version of themselves that seems to be from another world now as we all readjust to new, more isolating ways of working and try to forget how close we came to not surviving ourselves. 
If you are interested in finding out more about this webinar and /or making it available to your staff please contact me by completing this form. 
“I was surprised at how emotional the webinar made me feel. I hadn’t really thought about Covid, since just after, so it was surprising to feel so emotive about it still. I see the impact Covid has had on education, retention, wellbeing and working practices but don’t ever stop to consider it any further…….I enjoyed that the webinar wasn’t what I expected, I found out a lot more about my thoughts and feelings post covid” 
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