The CopeNYP program: A model for brief treatment of psychological distress among healthcare workers and hospital staff.

In the midst of the Spring 2020 initial surge of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York, members of the Psychiatry Department of Weill Cornell Medicine/NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital rapidly created and implemented a brief, behavioral skills-based intervention program, "CopeNYP", to address the immediate mental health needs of the employees of the hospital and medical school. We describe the development, implementation and evolution of this telehealth-delivered program staffed primarily by in-house clinical psychologists, postdoctoral fellows, pre-doctoral interns and counselors who were redeployed or volunteered their time to provide urgent support for employees. We discuss the challenges and lessons learned in providing brief, skills-based psychological interventions for employees subjected to chronic stress. As the impact of the pandemic became prolonged, employees faced compounding stressors including social isolation, fear of infection, grief and loss, and sequelae of COVID-19-related illness combined with work-related demands. Our goal is to present our program design, implementation, and utilization as a blueprint for other institutions that would like to develop an evidence-based clinician-staffed psychological intervention program to support ongoing employee mental health needs.

Psychometrics of the PTSD and Depression Screener for Bereaved Youth.

Interventions for bereaved children and families range from supportive counseling, designed to promote social connectedness and expression of feelings and thoughts about the deceased, to intensive trauma/grief-specific therapy, designed to ameliorate symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression. That said, professionals have few brief assessment instruments to match response and functioning to appropriate interventions. To expedite the screening and referral process for bereaved families, Brown, Goodman, and Swiecicki ( 2008 ) developed the PTSD and Depression Screener for Bereaved Youth, a 19-item measure of bereavement-related history and symptoms of PTSD and depression. The current study is a psychometric evaluation of the Screener for Bereaved Youth. Data were collected from 284 bereaved children, 6-17 years of age (M = 12.4; SD = 2.9). A factor analysis revealed distinct subscales for PTSD (eight items) and depression (four items). The PTSD and depression subscales showed both concurrent and discriminant validity. Endorsement of four items on either subscale was associated with meeting full criteria on more extensive measures of PTSD and depression. These findings are discussed with specific consideration to the multiple systems in which the measure could be used and applications to clinical services.