Protecting the Protectors: Prioritizing Mental Health
I read earlier this week about an emergency room doctor in NYC that died by suicide after learning she had been infected with COVID-19. The story broke my heart. During this uncertain time, I cannot fathom the burden healthcare workers are facing. Gearing up to go to battle each day with limited supplies, they are under enormous stress. A combination of reading stories of tragedy and hearing anecdotes from our personal network motivated my team and I to create The Sukhi Project mobile app, providing bite-sized meditations to help front line healthcare workers deal with the stress of pandemic response.
I co-founded Sukhi, a mental health wellness startup, to provide culturally sensitive mental wellness resources and corporate mindfulness tools. Typically, our team’s clients are employees that work for consulting firms, banks, and tech companies. They’re under stress, but not necessarily to the degree that front line healthcare workers are. By creating an accessible resource that specifically addresses the needs of those who are working so hard to keep us healthy, The Sukhi Project mobile app allows healthcare workers to pause and reset before, during, and after their shifts.
While many professionals are transitioning to working from home, most in the medical field can’t do their jobs via a teleconferencing platform. This pandemic separates healthcare workers from their support structures, rendering them physically and emotionally vulnerable. Health workers face an unprecedented wave of anxiety as they balance social isolation, protective gear shortages, and exposure to a highly infectious virus.
For weeks, my news feed has been filled with videos from healthcare workers in emergency rooms across the country depicting their stressful work conditions. They look tired, anxious, and in need of rest. With this app, we hope to create moments of tranquility, specifically designed for their needs. Recordings include an energy boosting meditation to do before shifts, a quick stress reduction meditation for a reset following moments of distress, and calming exercises to foster relaxation and sleep once they return home.
A close friend and NYC-based nurse highlighted the need for a meditation tool that fits with a time-crunched schedule: “I currently only use apps to help me go to bed at night. However, this would be so helpful to have in the moment at work. I don’t have 10 minutes to spare on a shift, but a quick mental break would be very welcome! I know I’d use it and so would the rest of the nurses in my ward.”
Such interviews validated our team’s idea to rush the release of the app at no cost. I’ve personally seen how meditation and mindfulness training has been transformative for working teams already. While our medical community works diligently to take care of us, we want to do our part to help them to take care of themselves. Our hope is to enable some well-deserved moments of calm for those in the center of the storm.
Rahul Kulkarni worked on the USAID ASSIST project as a 2013–2014 GHC fellow in Uganda. He is the CEO of Sukhi and previously worked as a McKinsey consultant and for the UN World Food Program. He has a MBA from MIT and an MPH from Tufts University School of Medicine.
Global Health Corps (GHC) is a leadership development organization building the next generation of health equity leaders around the world. All GHC fellows, partners, and supporters are united in a common belief: health is a human right. There is a role for everyone in the movement for health equity. To learn more, visit our website and connect with us on Twitter/Instagram/Facebook.
