Dignity Gardens: Supporting Research
This supports the project I’m developing at www.dignitygardens.org.
Medical Workers & PTSD
2016 study: 16% of Italian of emergency medical workers were diagnosed with PTSD under normal pre-COVID conditions
2018 study: “Our data suggest a high risk for PTSD and post-traumatic stress spectrum symptoms in nurses and health care workers operating in an emergency department, particularly among health care assistants, women, older, and non-graduated operators.”
2015 study: PTSD in 28% of workers doing pulmonary resuscitation
2004 study: “Many health care workers were emotionally affected and traumatized during the SARS outbreak. It is important for health care institutions to provide psychosocial support and intervention…”
Emergency Nurses are especially vulnerable to post-traumatic stress reactions…This can impact quality of care… Hospital management should invest in…time-out facilities, cognitive-behavioral interventions and psychological counseling for Emergency Nurses on demand. (2012 study)
PTSD can reduce performance. The association between PTSD and other psychopathologies examined during a wave of suicide bombing in Jerusalem: Doctors with PTSD symptoms demonstrated significantly more anxiety, depression, negative coping strategies and burnout. Hospital doctors who develop PTSD symptoms suffer greater burnout and manifest negative coping strategies but are reluctant to receive treatment. (2008 study)
Restorative Gardens
Melissa Nicole Philen at Virginia Tech in 2016 proposed that innovative practitioners could fuse these two components:
Private, restorative, healing garden to maintain physicians’ well-being and rehabilitate physicians experiencing burnout
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction
Evidence-based therapy clinically proven to cultivate emotional healing for physicians suffering burnout
Citing:
Medical staff regularly visit healing gardens to escape work-related stress
(Marcus and Sachs, 2014)Reports on the prevalence of physician burnout, warn of a widespread crisis (T. D. Shanafelt et al., 2015).