Maddalena Ferrari lets herself cry when she takes off the surgical mask she wears even at home to protect her elderly parents from the coronavirus that surrounds her at work in one of Italy’s hardest-hit intensive care units.
In the privacy of her own bedroom, where no one can see, the nursing coordinator peels away the mask that both protects her and hides her, and weeps for all the patients lost that day at Bergamo’s Pope John XXIII Hospital.
“We’re losing an entire generation,” Ferrari said at the end of one of her shifts. “They still had so much to teach us.”
The pressures on hospital ICUs in Italy and Spain may have eased in recent days as new virus cases decline. But the emotional and psychological toll the pandemic has taken on the doctors and nurses working there is only now beginning to emerge.
Already, two nurses in Italy have killed themselves, and psychologists have mobilized therapists and online platforms to provide free consultation for medical personnel. Individual hospitals hold small group therapy sessions to help staff cope with the trauma of seeing so much death among patients who are utterly alone.
Seven weeks into Italy’s outbreak, the world’s deadliest, the adrenaline rush that kept medical personnel going at the start has been replaced by crushing fatigue and fear of getting the virus, researchers say. With many doctors and nurses deprived of their normal family support because they are isolating themselves, the mental health of Italy and Spain’s overwhelmed medical personnel is now a focus of their already stressed health care systems.
“The adrenaline factor works for a month, maximum,” said Dr. Alessandro Colombo, director of the health care training academy for the Lombardy region, who is researching the psychological toll of the outbreak on medical personnel. “We are entering the second month, so these people are physically and mentally tired.”
According to his preliminary research, the solitude of the patients has had a grievous impact on doctors and nurses. They are being asked to step in at the bedside of the dying in place of relatives and even priests. The sense of failure among hospital staff, he said, is overwhelming.
“Each time it’s a failure,” said Ferrari, the nursing coordinator at the Bergamo’ hospital. You do everything for the patient, and “at the end, if you’re a believer, there is someone above you who has decided another destiny for that person.”
Her colleague, Maria Berardelli, said medical personnel aren’t used to seeing patients die after two weeks on ventilators, and the emotional toll is devastating.
“This virus is strong. Strong, strong strong,” she said in a Skype interview with Ferrari, both of them in masks. “You cannot get used to it, because every patient has his own story.”
In Italy, the national association of nurses and psychologists asked the government for a coordinated, nationwide response for the mental health care needs of medical personnel, warning the “typical wave of stress disturbances is only going to grow over time.”
The situation is similar in Spain.
