Healthcare professionals face extremely high levels of stress. Since the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine, this pressure has grown even greater.

Enabel in partnership with the Ministry of Health of Ukraine is launching an initiative to support the mental health of healthcare providers. The project takes a comprehensive approach: establishing psychological relief rooms and providing training on stress and burnout prevention.

The first spaces will be established in five healthcare facilities in the Kyiv and Chernihiv regions that are being renovated and equipped with support from Belgium. These include Kyiv Regional Clinical Hospital, Pryluky Central City Hospital, Koriukivka District Hospital, Kyiv City Clinical Hospital No. 8, and Bila Tserkva City Hospital No. 2.

To gain deeper insight into the real needs of staff in self-managing high level of stress, we organised a training for 60 healthcare workers from these facilities. Participants shared their ideas for creating psychologically safe spaces and explored different stress-management techniques.

A separate session focused on developing standard operating procedures for the use of these spaces. Common requests voiced by healthcare providers included fair access to the rooms and the possibility to take a break without having to justify it to their supervisors and colleagues.

The next steps in developing the initiative are setting up recovery spaces in selected hospitals and supervisory visits to these facilities.

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