Dr Natalie Ashburner, Vice-Chair of DAUK and an NHS psychiatrist, spoke to Al Jazeera about the impact the Covid-19 pandemic is having on the mental health and wellbeing of NHS staff:
“We see extremely high numbers of what you would recognise as psychological burnout. The problem is that, you know, you might say that we’re in the peak of this in a week or a couple of weeks from now, and perhaps things will start to get better. But in terms of the work for the NHS, it certainly won’t stop there, and we have long backlogs of planned care that has been cancelled that we’ll need to catch up on.
And then obviously we will need to come to terms with what’s happened. But we won’t be able to just stop, we won’t be able to give everybody a break. They will need to continue on, and that’s when I think that we will really see the real surge in problems with mental health.”
Dr Natalie Ashburner, DAUK Vice-Chair
