One of the things I’ve been thinking about since the pandemic started is the toll it’s taking on healthcare workers. As annoying as it is for the vast majority of us to be quarantined in insolation, lonely and depressed, anxiety riddled and fearful, just imagine how much worse it is for the people actually on the frontlines, the people actually wearing PPE all day. There’s a reason why there was a push for Time Magazine to name frontline healthcare workers as their person of the year for 2020. They are the true heroes of the pandemic. And they are suffering.
I can only imagine how much stress they are under. How much PTSD they are going to wind up with. But thankfully there is at least a little reprieve they can receive. Thanks to multi-sensory, technology driven recharge rooms being set up in some hospitals across the country.
As Wired puts it:
“When asked about what the future looks like for health care workers, [Mariam] Zakhary says, ‘When the dust settles, we’ll have so many emotions to deal with—almost like the military on the front lines when they come back to real life, and the PTSD hits.’ Reflecting on the beginning of the pandemic, she says, ‘The recharge rooms were a retreat. Every single thing around us was a negative statistic. How many more lives were lost on our unit? How many ventilators short were we? How many more beds did we need out in Central Park? How much PPE did we have left? But in the recharge room—for a few minutes, you weren’t in that world anymore.'”
What world were you in?! Well…
“When you walk in, a fire is crackling. You instinctively lean forward. You hear the sounds of a forest—crickets, birds, and even butterflies fluttering past. Your mind, once a fraught jumble of stresses and worries, clears as your shoulders relax—you’re now focused solely on the scene in front of you.
When staff in Mount Sinai hospitals walk into the room, technology takes over. The rooms are voice-activated through Google Home, so workers don’t touch anything, to avoid spreading infections. Visitors typically spend 10 to 15 minutes in the space, which is sanitized after each visit. The rooms offer a brief respite from the anxiety, stress, and trauma health care workers face every day: rising new cases, supplies shortages, and death.
The rooms [David] Putrino created in his lab are based on his research. ‘The underlying principle here is that space is never neutral—it hurts, or it helps.’ When asked about his role, he says, ‘My job is to use technology to make people’s lives better. I don’t care about grants, getting papers published, going to conferences—all of that is just signaling that you’re part of a club, and totally peripheral to our actual goal of using science and technology to transform people’s lives,’ he says. ‘When it comes to forming teams, it is all about stepping out of the ivory tower and being a part of an interdisciplinary team. Most of our problems are only problems because people aren’t stepping out of their own silos to solve them. It’s really that simple.’
A recent Frontiers in Psychology study indicates that just 15 minutes in the recharge room at the end of a shift can reduce stress by up to 60 percent.”
Hopefully, these recharge rooms continue to help out the frontline healthcare workers who desperately need them and even grow in popularity so that they spread to other hospitals and eventually other professions. Perhaps even one day becoming commonplace in all office spaces and apartment complexes. Because one thing’s for sure right now: we can all use a recharge every now and again.
Leave a comment