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The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the impact work can have on healthcare workers and the importance of staff support services. Rapid guidance was published to encourage preventive and responsive support for healthcare workers.
Aims
To understand mental healthcare staff's help-seeking behaviours and access to support at work in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, to inform iterative improvements to provision of staff support.
Method
We conducted a formative appraisal of access to support and support needs of staff in a National Health Service mental health trust. This involved 11 semi-structured individual interviews using a topic guide. Five virtual staff forums were additional sources of data. Reflexive thematic analysis was used to identify key themes.
Results
Peer-based, within-team support was highly valued and sought after. However, access to support was negatively affected by work pressures, physical distancing and perceived cultural barriers.
Conclusions
Healthcare organisations need to help colleagues to support each other by facilitating open, diverse workplace cultures and providing easily accessible, safe and reflective spaces. Future research should evaluate support in the evolving work contexts imposed by COVID-19 to inform interventions that account for differences across healthcare workforces.
Research on sickness absence has typically focussed on single diagnoses, despite increasing recognition that long-term health conditions are highly multimorbid and clusters comprising coexisting mental and physical conditions are associated with poorer clinical and functional outcomes. The digitisation of sickness certification in the UK offers an opportunity to address sickness absence in a large primary care population.
Methods
Lambeth Datanet is a primary care database which collects individual-level data on general practitioner consultations, prescriptions, Quality and Outcomes Framework diagnostic data, sickness certification (fit note receipt) and demographic information (including age, gender, self-identified ethnicity, and truncated postcode). We analysed 326 415 people's records covering a 40-month period from January 2014 to April 2017.
Results
We found significant variation in multimorbidity by demographic variables, most notably by self-defined ethnicity. Multimorbid health conditions were associated with increased fit note receipt. Comorbid depression had the largest impact on first fit note receipt, more than any other comorbid diagnoses. Highest rates of first fit note receipt after adjustment for demographics were for comorbid epilepsy and rheumatoid arthritis (HR 4.69; 95% CI 1.73–12.68), followed by epilepsy and depression (HR 4.19; 95% CI 3.60–4.87), chronic pain and depression (HR 4.14; 95% CI 3.69–4.65), cardiac condition and depression (HR 4.08; 95% CI 3.36–4.95).
Conclusions
Our results show striking variation in multimorbid conditions by gender, deprivation and ethnicity, and highlight the importance of multimorbidity, in particular comorbid depression, as a leading cause of disability among working-age adults.
Co-occurrence of common mental disorders (CMD) with psychotic experiences is well-known. There is little research on the public mental health relevance of concurrent psychotic experiences for service use, suicidality, and poor physical health. We aim to: (1) describe the distribution of psychotic experiences co-occurring with a range of non-psychotic psychiatric disorders [CMD, depressive episode, anxiety disorder, probable post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and personality dysfunction], and (2) examine associations of concurrent psychotic experiences with secondary mental healthcare use, psychological treatment use for CMD, lifetime suicide attempts, and poor self-rated health.
Methods
We linked a prospective cross-sectional community health survey with a mental healthcare provider database. For each non-psychotic psychiatric disorder, patients with concurrent psychotic experiences were compared to those without psychotic experiences on use of secondary mental healthcare, psychological treatment for CMD, suicide attempt, physical functioning, and a composite multimorbidity score, using logistic regression and Cox regressions.
Results
In all disorders except for anxiety disorder, concurrent psychotic experiences were accompanied by a greater odds of all outcomes (odds ratios) for a unit change in composite multimorbidity score ranged between 2.21 [95% confidence interval (CI) 1.49–3.27] and 3.46 (95% CI 1.52–7.85). Hazard ratios for secondary mental health service use for non-psychotic disorders with concurrent psychotic experiences, ranged from 0.53 (95% CI 0.15–1.86) for anxiety disorders with psychotic experiences to 4.99 (95% CI 1.22–20.44) among those with PTSD with psychotic experiences.
Conclusions
Co-occurring psychotic experiences indicate greater public mental health burden, suggesting psychotic experiences could be a marker for future preventive strategies improving public mental health.
Most studies of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in low- and
middle-income countries (LMICs) have focused on ‘high-risk’ populations
defined by exposure to trauma.
Aims
To estimate the prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in a
LMIC, the conditional probability of PTSD given a traumatic event and the
strength of associations between traumatic events and other psychiatric
disorders.
Method
Our sample contained a mix of 3995 twins and 2019 non-twins. We asked
participants about nine different traumatic exposures, including the
category ‘other’, but excluding sexual trauma.
Results
Traumatic events were reported by 36.3% of participants and lifetime PTSD
was present in 2.0%. Prevalence of non-PTSD lifetime diagnosis was 19.1%.
Of people who had experienced three or more traumatic events, 13.3% had
lifetime PTSD and 40.4% had a non-PTSD psychiatric diagnosis.
Conclusions
Despite high rates of exposure to trauma, this population had lower rates
of PTSD than high-income populations, although the prevalence might have
been slightly affected by the exclusion of sexual trauma. There are high
rates of non-PTSD diagnoses associated with trauma exposure that could be
considered in interventions for trauma-exposed populations. Our findings
suggest that there is no unique relationship between traumatic
experiences and the specific symptomatology of PTSD.