Psychological first aid as a remedy to reduce mental health stigma – Christina Watlington, PhD and Christine McGuire, MSc

Apple Podcast | Spotify

Episode 90 | Duration: 37:55

Christina Watlington, PhD, is the Caregiver Wellbeing Specialist at the Center for WorkLife Wellbeing at ChristianaCare. In her role, she focuses on creating programming that helps mitigate the factors of stress, burnout, vicarious trauma and compassion fatigue for caregivers in acute and ambulatory healthcare settings. As an early career psychologist, Christina was the coordinator for the Returning Veterans Outreach, Education and Care program at the VA Maryland Healthcare System. She also worked for Pathways Human Services, a large Behavioral Health company, in a variety of leadership roles. Christina led a private practice in Wilmington, DE with a team of clinicians. She continues to maintain a part-time solo practice and is the president-elect for the Delaware Psychological Association.

Christine McGuire Chloros, Msc, is the Care for the Caregiver Program Manager at ChristianaCare, where her team provides peer support to caregivers across the ChristianaCare system.  Her diverse background includes psychological counseling, education and training, as well as actively leading initiatives to prioritize and enhance the overall patient experience. She spent most of her adult life overseas, where she co-authored two books on wellbeing and navigating personal change. In 2019 she was the recipient of the Planetree Scholar Award for her contributions to advance person-centered care. She is passionate about cultivating a culture of wellbeing for organizations and amongst caregivers so they may thrive and provide the best possible care for patients, families and the community at large.

In this episode of Caring Greatly, Christina and Christine share the details of the Psychological First Aid (PFA) training they created and launched at ChristianaCare. Their training, which has reached more than 50% of leaders at ChristianaCare, uses an easy-to-remember three-step model of recognizing signs of stress or distress, supporting immediate recovery and referring team members to additional resources provided by ChristianaCare to support team member safety and wellbeing. As a result, the number of referrals to the organization’s Care for the Caregiver program has doubled. Essentially, PFA serves as a culture change mechanism to help reduce the stigma around mental health care. By giving leaders and bedside team members a shared vocabulary around safety and wellbeing, help-seeking behavior is being normalized. It’s also opening new horizons and expanding resources to support more elements of trauma recovery and trauma-informed care and leadership.

Related links

• Journal of Traumatic Stress: We need to build the evidence: A systematic review of psychological first aid on mental health and wellbeing
• Center for Workplace Mental Health toolkit: Improving mental health care for clinicians: Leading interventions for your workforce
• For the Love of Health podcast: Mental health in health care and psychological first aid