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Ricerche di Psicologia/Psychological Research Journal - Open Access

Articoli

No. 2 (2022)

Caring hospitalized patients with COVID-19: Psychological emerging needs and interventions

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3280/rip2022oa14386
Submitted
luglio 26, 2022
Published
2022-07-27

Abstract

The Coronavirus-19 (COVID-19) disease pandemic has a huge impact on global health and hospitals, which have had to reorganize their services to deal with an unprecedented health emergency. This paper describes the experience of the Clinical Psychology Unit of a large healthcare organization in Milan (Italy), focusing on the interventions delivered for hospitalized COVID-19 patients with the aim of highlighting their experiences and related psychological needs, and propose reflections on the functions that the psychologist can have with respect to these needs. The reflections are based on an extensive clinical experience conducted in presence for over a year with those patients hospitalized for COVID-19 who have received treatment with C-PAP, helmet, or low-flow oxygen. This led to the bottom-up identification of three macro-areas of issues that these patients face: isolation, fear of death, grief. In addition, two further transversal themes have been identified – guilt and the perception of time – which seem to modulate the articulation of the three macro-areas. Starting from these experiences and needs, two lines of actions of the psychologist with the hospitalized COVID-19 patient are identified that correspond to the two phases of hospitalization: 1) an action in the ‘here and now’ when the patient is still in a critical phase; 2) an action of narrative recovery of the lived experience when the patient is recovering.
The importance for hospitalized COVID-19 patients of delivering psychological consultations in presence is supported by clinical experience; however, its effectiveness in preventing subsequent maladjustments should be evaluated in further studies.

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