Tag: mental health

Adapted from BMJ 25 October 2025

A Care Under Pressure review by J. Maben et al has examined the causes and solutions to workplace psychological ill health in nurses, midwives and paramedics.

The NHS needs healthy, motivated staff to provide high quality patient care. Nurses, midwives and paramedics make up 56% of clinical staff in the NHS and they have high rates of mental health problems.

High pressure environments with heavy workloads and staff shortages are linked to mental ill health. In 2023 42% of NHS staff reported psychological unwellness due to work related stress. 32% said there was not enough staff to do the job properly and 74% said they suffered from unrealistic time pressures.

Psychological ill health in turn increases staff sickness and resignations. Other staff are under performing because they are at work while under severe psychological stress. Patient care suffers as a result. The estimated cost of this is 12 billion a year to the NHS. The review researchers think that they could save up to 1 billion a year if their recommendations were implemented.

Over 200 research papers were examined for the review. They found that aspects of the job and workplace were more important than the individual profession when it came to the causation of psychological distress.

Those who were most at risk were staff in roles that exposed them to trauma, newly qualified staff and lone workers.

They found that failure to take a long term view of effects on staff, the blame culture, managers who don’t listen to employees, and prioritisation of the needs of the system over the individual, were major causes of psychological distress.

Matters could be improved if the NHS invested in the provision of long term psychological support, reduce bullying and harassment, provide space and places for staff to share experiences and use an evidence based framework to evaluate interventions.

The stigma of having psychological distress in response to work needs to change. The blame culture needs to be tackled. Most staff are simply doing the best they can under very difficult circumstances. Essential needs such as access to hot food, lockers, showers, car parking, rest and break rooms are needed.

Improvements need to be tailored to the local workforce needs. The researchers have produced a summary, guidance and webinar of their work for leaders, nurses, midwives and paramedics.

Adapted from Medscape News by Megan Brooks July 13 2022

Transmission of anxiety appears to be sex specific. It spreads from mothers to daughters and from fathers to sons, new research shows.

Dr Barbara Pavlova from Nova Scotia says that findings suggest that anxiety is a learned behaviour from parents. Therefore, perhaps it is preventable. Effective treatment of anxiety in young adults, prior to parenthood, could make a difference to children too.

Anxiety disorders are known to run in families. Both genes and environment are thought to be at play.

If a mother for instance has an anxiety disorder, the chance of a daughter developing it, by an average age of 11 years old, is 2.85 times normal, but this is not the case for her son, who would have a normal risk.

Of 398 children studied 27% had been diagnosed with some sort of anxiety disorder including generalised anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, separation anxiety disorder or a specific phobia.

The rates increased with the age of the child from 14% in the under 9s to 52% in the over 14s. There was a similar rate of anxiety in both boys and girls. Rates were lower if one parent had the disorder and higher if two parents had the disorder. Dr Pavlova thinks that a child will tend to model themselves on their same sex parent.

Anxiety disorders are the most common psychiatric disorder and emerge earlier than mood disorders.

My comment: I was interested to see this information. My mother had GAD, generalised anxiety disorder, and I have had a specific phobia since I was about 9 (Spiders!). If I was going to get something I suspect that a common specific phobia is a lot less disruptive to life than GAD. The good news is that I’m not a pilot on a jet plane!

Abdominal pain in childhood is associated with increased risk for persistent long term pain and severe mental illness in adulthood. Therefore, it is good to see that a simple intervention of involvement in dance and yoga were considerably more effective in dealing with functional pain than in girls who received standard care.

This was a prospective, multicentre, randomised controlled trial. 121 girls aged between 9 and 13 with functional abdominal pain syndrome or irritable bowel syndrome had standard care or participated in dance and yoga intervention twice a week for 8 months. 55% of the intervention group continued for the whole 8 months of the study.

The dance group were more likely to report a decrease in the maximal abdominal pain at 4 months and 8 months. At 8 months 46% of the dance group reported less pain compared to 17% in the control group.

Hogstrom et al. Dance and yoga reduced functional abdominal pain in young girls. A randomised controlled trial. Eur J Pain. 2021 Sept 16.

Being employed seems to reduce the onset of dementia in women later on in life.

In the USA, 6 thousand women took part in the Health and Retirement study. Rates of memory decline were around 50% faster in those women who did not work for pay in the years after having children. Regardless of marital status and whether they had children, women who worked for pay in early adulthood and midlife showed slower rates of later life memory decline.

My comment: I wonder if the 80 years full time equivalent that I’ve racked up for the NHS will stand me in good stead then?

Once you are old, both men and women’s rates of memory decline from Alzheimer’s greatly accelerates if either experience the death of their spouse.

The Harvard Ageing Brain study did PET scans of participants’ brains at recruitment. They then had annual cognitive assessments. Those who had higher amyloid in the brain to star with deteriorated faster whether they were married or not, but the steepest drop occurred in those whose who were widowed.