By Mary Chris Jaklevic, JAMA, January 13, 2021
Daniel Hao, MD, wasn’t emotionally prepared for the crush of severely ill patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) who came under his care in March 2020. Many were young, sedated, and dying alone. Sometimes while FaceTiming with their families, Hao saw very young children on the screen.
“It was frightening,” Hao, an anesthesia resident at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, said in an interview. “A lot of the things that we typically see in the intensive care unit with passing [away]—in terms of people being able to chat with their family members, being able to understand and communicate with clinicians about what exactly is going on—was taken away from them.”
To talk through his experiences, Hao reached out to a therapist. But he didn’t use the hospital’s employee assistance program or its peer support system. Instead, he contacted The Emotional PPE Project, one of at least 3 volunteer organizations that sprang up early in the pandemic to link health care workers with licensed mental health practitioners who were willing to counsel them for free.
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