Presenters
- John Rolland, MD, MPH, Professor of Psychiatry & Executive Co-Director, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine & Chicago Center for Family Health, Chicago, IL
- Stephanie Trudeau, PhD, Project Manager, Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ
- Brittany Huelett, PhD, Associate Marriage and Family Therapist and Assistant Professor, Texas Women's University, Denton, TX
Summary
As COVID-19 is entering an endemic chronic phase, we are facing growing poor mental health and emerging prolonged health issues across the lifespan. These consequences will increasingly present themselves in healthcare settings. How can we best help patients and their families/key networks with both relational and longer-term health and mental health sequelae and ongoing uncertainties of the evolution of the pandemic/post-pandemic? Using a multisystemic family-oriented lens, this presentation highlights strategies to foster resilience, family relationships repair and healing, and meaning-making of the COVID-19 experience. We address such issues as (a) family depletion, residual distancing, intolerance, cutoffs; (b) communication amongst family members and with healthcare providers that hinder or promote optimal COVID-related health behaviors; (c) long-term COVID-19 health and cognitive complications (“long-haulers”); d) divergent family member perspectives and beliefs about ongoing COVID-19 precautions based on different historical, cultural, political, and ideological filters; (e) complicated loss and bereavement, racial injustice, and socioeconomic disparities Through the intervention of family-centered consultation, this presentation will offer strategies to address the nuanced and lingering biopsychosocial-spiritual impacts the COVID-19 pandemic has had on individuals and families. In a post pandemic world, consideration needs to be given to all relational systems that come into contact with the public health, and healthcare sectors.
Objectives
- Enable HCP to use a multisystemic family-oriented and resilience-oriented approach to help patients & families address longer-term health and menta
- Provide strategies for HCP to foster repair of family relationships, meaning-making, and communication with HCP to promote optimal COVID-related he
- Enable HCP to assess for relational resilience factors, and co-create strategies of growth with patients and families using a systemic lens.
