COVID-19: Fighting anxiety with multi-media
As of March 10, 2020, there were 80924 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 59983 cured cases in China. In China, the vast majority of patients are family clustering cases. Many patients and their families may be treated in different hospitals, so they could not meet each other. Many patients had mild anxiety, and even some patients developed delirium, especially the elderly.
The patients with COVID-19 are more vulnerable psychologically. First, some patients did not live in the same hospital with their families, so they miss their relatives and worry about their condition. Second, some patients' relatives died, which made them grieved and panic. Third, some index patients transmitted the virus to their loved relatives or colleagues, which made them feel deep guilt. Fourth, they were treated in isolation and were prone to loneliness. In the face of these patients, doctors tend to focus on the changes in patients' condition and ignore the patients' psychology. How to deal with patients' anxiety?
In General Hill hospital of Guizhou Province, the nursing team from Zunyi Medical University used modern multimedia technology to effectively alleviate patients' anxiety. Use WeChat video to help the elderly patients to make video calls with their families. Let patients and their families strengthen psychological communication. Let patients feel the outside world with Virtual Reality (VR) (Figure 1).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We thank all patients in this report. We are really grateful to all the health workers around the world. Their expertise and humanity are fundamental to stop SARS‑COV‑2 from spreading further.
DISCLOSURE
All authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS
BF drafted the manuscript. FC provided the pictures. XYF revised the manuscript.
COMPLIANCE WITH ETHICAL STANDARDS
Written consent from the patient was waived, because of entirely anonymised images from which the individual cannot be identified.
CONSENT FOR PUBLICATION
Not applicable.
