COVID-19 Anxiety, Burnout, and Emotional Labor in Community Health Providers
Hello everyone!
I’m Priya Verma, and my project is “COVID-19 Anxiety, Burnout, and Emotional Labor in Community Health Providers.”
My research question for this project is: What is the relationship between COVID-19 anxiety, emotional labor, and burnout in community health providers working at MHC Healthcare?
As the pandemic has been declassified as a public health emergency (US Department of Health and Human Services, 2023) and we begin to return once more to normal life, healthcare workers are often caught in between, as they see COVID patients at work while also trying to return to normal. Therefore, I’m looking to study the psychological burden on healthcare workers as society moves forward beyond the pandemic. This information will be vital to supporting healthcare workers in the future after such a long period of stress and unsafe patient ratios. Community health workers were hit particularly hard by this, as they are already under extra stress by working daily with struggling and vulnerable populations (Alston, 2017). The pandemic increased the number of patients coming to community health centers, and as restrictions are lifted, community health programs continue to work to return to normal.
To study this, I’ll be performing a case study on MHC Healthcare, Arizona’s longest-serving community health center, based in Tucson and Marana, AZ (MHC Healthcare, 2022). I’ll be surveying and interviewing their providers in order to determine their current levels of emotional labor, burnout, and COVID-19 anxiety, along with gaining more qualitative insight into the remaining effects of COVID-19 on their lives. I’m working mainly with Ms. Lisa Webster, Executive Director of Development at MHC Healthcare.
My site placement for the internship portion of this project is at HonorHealth’s Deer Valley Medical Center, which is not a community health organization. Because of this, I’ll be using my experiences there and my interactions with the staff to see if nonprofit, non-community health settings have any differences in their feelings on COVID-19 compared to MHC Healthcare. My supervisor is Ms. Kylene Price, DVMC Volunteer Services Supervisor.
The final product of this project will be an AP Capstone paper along with the presentation, which will discuss my findings as well as provide possible avenues for MHC Healthcare to explore in supporting their providers as we slowly return to normal.
– Priya <3
Links:
(Alston, 2017) – https://repository.lib.ncsu.edu/bitstream/handle/1840.20/33632/etd.pdf?sequence=1
(MHC Healthcare, 2022) – https://mhchealthcare.org/about-us/
(US Department of Health and Human Services, 2023) – https://www.hhs.gov/coronavirus/covid-19-public-health-emergency/index.html