Caring for Healthcare Providers in COVID-19

There is concern for the mental health of healthcare providers during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, we focus on the protective strategies that all people, but in this case healthcare providers, use when facing danger and how specific preventive responses could reduce the mental health burden to nurses, doctors, and emergency medical personnel working in hospitals. Our primary contributions are to demonstrate that healthcare providers are not a homogeneous group regarding mental health risks and that, consequently, individuals might need different forms of preventive and ameliorative response. We propose some (a) universally beneficial approaches, (b) strategy-specific approaches, and (c) strategy-specific contra-indicated approaches. Our two central points are that there are important psychological differences among healthcare providers and that these create different mental health needs in the COVID-19 crisis and require different protective solutions.