The COVID-19 pandemic spread rapidly around the world and led to over 7 million deaths. The psychological impact on health and care workers across the globe was unprecedented, and our research found high levels of anxiety, burnout and post-traumatic stress. There were no supportive interventions available at that time, and urgent action was needed. In March 2020, within 3 weeks of pandemic outbreak, we developed and released a comprehensive digital package including evidence-based guidance, support and signposting relating to mitigating the psychological impacts of the pandemic on the health and care workforce. The package outlined the actions that team leaders can take to provide ‘psychologically safe’ spaces for staff and support workforce mental health. It provided internationally relevant guidance on communication and reducing social stigma, peer and family support, signposting others to support through psychological first aid (PFA), self-care strategies and managing emotions.

Package evaluation established high fidelity of both package delivery and engagement, and good implementation qualities measured in terms of practicality, resource challenges, attitudes, acceptability and usability. Within 7 days of release, the package had >50,000 exposures via social media and 17,633 users (rising to almost 80,000 within 12 months). Evaluation showed evidence of impact within 7 days. Specifically, 82% of evaluation participants reported already having applied the package content in their work or home lives (‘intervention enactment’), and 100% anticipated they would apply it in the future (‘enactment intentions’).

‘Intervention enactment’ included:
(1) applied new knowledge to emotionally support colleagues and family members,
(2) undertook training in psychological first aid (PFA) to develop new skills,
(3) called a telephone helpline to access support for themselves,
(4) implemented advice around coping with their own emotions and understanding emotions of others,
(5) accessed other digital support signposted from within the package, such as sleep or mental health apps,
(6) included the digital package within their organisation’s COVID-19 Staff Health and Wellbeing provisions or uploaded the package to internal educational resource portals,
(7) embedded the resource within healthcare trainee educational curriculum,
(8) shared the resource, or materials from it, with:
(i) clinical teams,
(ii) non-clinical work colleagues,
(iii) external professional networks,
(iv) healthcare students,
(v) family and friends.

Sharing occurred via discussion, education and training workshops, emails, print media, websites and social media.

Our journal article reporting the development and evaluation of this package is cited in international policy documents. In the research literature, it remains the highest cited in its field, evidenced by two bibliometric analyses of global research into COVID-19 e-learning (July 2022) and digital interventions for mental wellbeing promotion (March 2024). For this work, we won an award in ‘The Hidden REF 2024’ UK (November 2024), in the category of ‘Communicative Outputs’ which recognised the global reach and impact of this digital package in a time of crisis.

Keywords: Technology, Digital, Workforce, Healthcare, Education, Support, Mental Health, Psychological Wellbeing, COVID-19, Research Impact.