Landmark trial of NHS staff by King’s College London reveals promising solution to improve mental health

Koa Health | Landmark trial of NHS staff by King’s College London reveals promising solution to improve mental health

also here Landmark trial of NHS staff reveals promising solution to improve mental health (kcl.ac.uk)

paper here
Multicentre, England-wide randomised controlled trial of the ‘Foundations’ smartphone application in improving mental health and well-being in a healthcare worker population | Request PDF (researchgate.net)

 

If this is workplace-based I can't help but feel 'other factors' need to be mapped into any claims regarding influence. e.g. if people with issues started getting sacked, disciplined etc more over the time period of the study that might account for 'improvement in responses' for reasons very different to any health issues actually improving. People also are no longer 'in lockdown'

A simplistic example, but intended to represent 'the gamut' of what we hear of going on in workplaces etc.

 

What a ringing endorsement. "Can be of help". So it may not be. It all depends.

 

This is Kings College, they are at the heart of rebellion against the NICE guidelines and trying to hide they are still using the BPS model by renaming their fatigue clinic to a physical alignments one, Dr Shepherd wrote to them just a couple of weeks ago (no response yet). Kings is dreadful for overuse of Psychology and research in ME/CFS, they aren't exactly big on quality research.

 

In case anyone wants to read the full article, Wessely is one of the authors...

Here is a link

 

Lmao. Welcome to the same dystopian nonsense. The worst thing to have happened to mental health is medicine getting involved decades before they understand anything. "Can be of help". What a giant scam.

 

No control group / other key sector workers involvement ?

 

Who defined "health workers' mental health" as the problem? Surely anyone concerned about the NHS should be looking at structural issues?

But of course it's an advert for an app, and seeing as the app "can be of help" for a thing, that thing has to be defined as the problem if you want to sell it. It isn't even a solution looking for a problem, because it won't commit itself to being a solution, it just "can be of help".

What a complete waste of time and an insult to anyone it may be foisted upon.

And what's so "Landmark" about it? It's just PR from a bunch of shysters trying to flog their latest dodgy app.

 

My worry is that research like this is myopic. The concept of giving HCWs a minfullness app feels like a band-aid approach. Actually improving people's lives will improve their mental health more. If you truly want HCWs to stay stable in the middle of a pandemic, you need to give them sufficient pay, sane hours, sane staffing ratios, and PPE. But achieving this requires both money and systemic change.

 

Is presenteeism (turning up to work while sick) considered a good thing or a bad thing?

 

Just randomly remembered some medical dude who was whining about how biomedical breakthroughs are very significant while biopsychosocial, uh, "work", I guess, isn't significant.

Biomedical breakthroughs: literally saved billions of lives combined, massively increased life expectancy and quality of life
Biopsychosocial "landmark studies": can be of help, "promising" despite being identical to work published 3+ decades ago and hundreds of studies and billions wasted in the process

I mean, yeah. This is the kind of research that backs the dystopian horror shown in the Amazon pictures I posted above with the mindfulness booths and cringy koans. It's the very best it can accomplish, while never actually delivering anything. Because this "can be of help" really isn't of actual help, it's not even clear what problem it's actually failing to solve, other than mostly arbitrary answers on awful questionnaires.

 

It's probably cheaper than doing even the bare minimum to temporarily improve even 5 minutes of someone's day.

Quiet place, tea, cake - 10 minutes.

Obviously, for overworked staff, in an under resourced system, it's just so much cheaper and easier to just send them a link in an email saying to try this app if they are feeling stressed.

Coz otherwise...tea, cake, and paying for someone else to work that 10 minutes, it all mounts up - after a while, tax payers money don't y'know, inefficient use of resources.

Much more efficient to have staff over stressed, burning out, sick, leaving - coz of course, then there is less staff, meaning less wages, but somehow the same amount of work still gets done (and anyone who says differently is clearly antiNHS and against all of it's hard working staff) - less cost, same results - that's increased efficiency.

(It was deemed a long time ago that increased efficiency, at any cost, was a good thing, but it seems odd, to me, that after 40 years of increasing efficiency, the NHS barely function and it's staff, at least those below board level, seem to be......stressed.

Surely it should all be a mega efficient, smoothly running, medical machine by now, with lots of happy well paid staff skipping around, delighted?)

 

no one ever really explaining in these things: how can an app logically be of help to mental distress?
So it can suggest try x or take a survey of symptoms but where is the’miracle extra bit’ that is offering support you’d think could make a difference

particularly if it’s for hcw who might have seen all sorts in horrid scary work conditions and feel ‘used’ at the end of all this having put themselves above and beyond with little support in return etc?

why is that never coming through in explanations?

 

That reminds me: something I read the other day suggested that the mindfulness practised in schools has had very little effect.