Clinical trial NCT05001542: Digital Interventions for Detection and Reduction of Moral Distress
Official title: Could Digital Interventions Help Understand And "Flatten The Curve" Of Distress Due To Moral Injury Among Health Care Workers During The COVID Pandemic?
Study type: INTERVENTIONAL
Overall status: COMPLETED
Phase: NA
Conditions: Moral Injury
Distress, Emotional
Keywords: Depression
Anxiety
Stress
Moral Injury
Moral Distress
Loneliness
Lead sponsor: Unity Health Toronto
Sponsor class: OTHER
Collaborators: name: Toronto Metropolitan University
name: University of Toronto
name: University of Ontario Institute of Technology
name: McMaster University
First posted: 2021-08-12
Enrollment: 15
Sex: ALL
Minimum age (years): 18
Standard ages: ADULT
OLDER_ADULT
Accepts healthy volunteers: yes
Allocation: NA
Intervention model: SINGLE_GROUP
Intervention model description: Users will go through a VR experiment before and after a brief interventional informative video describing moral distress. The VR experiment is a simulation that will lead the participant through a stressful experience about moral distress during the COVID-19 pandemic. Before, during, and after the experiment, active and physiological data will be collected from the participant to monitor their level of acute distress and health, respectively. Following the experiment, active and passive data will be collected on each user through the investigators' mobile platform (DiiG) for longitudinal monitoring of moral distress and injury.
Primary purpose: OTHER

Brief summary: Stress, anxiety, distress and depression are exceptionally high among healthcare workers at the frontline of the COVID-19 pandemic. Factors underlying distress and resilience are unknown and there are no evidence based interventions to impact the mental wellbeing of frontline healthcare workers. This study will evaluate a novel virtual reality platform to gather the "distress experience" of frontline healthcare workers at Unity Health Toronto in real time during the ongoing COVID pandemic by developing and showing feasibility of digital technology (Virtual Reality (VR) and mobile app) as a digital platform to understand the causes and ultimately reduce the moral distress of healthcare providers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The project will develop innovations which can be used for future pandemics and other contexts prone to producing moral distress and injury.


Eligibility criteria: Inclusion Criteria:

* Staff or healthcare providers working at Unity Health Toronto
* 18 years of age or older
* Must own a mobile phone running Android Version 6.0 and higher, or an iPhone 6 running OS 14 and higher)

Exclusion Criterion:

- Non-Unity Health Toronto staff

Primary outcomes:
measure: Feasibility evaluation of the virtual reality environment
timeFrame: 60 minutes (during the intervention)
Secondary outcomes:
measure: Feasibility evaluation of a mobile platform to understand the continuum of stress and moral distress.
timeFrame: Up to 8 weeks
Other outcomes:
Locations:
city: Toronto
country: Canada
facility: St. Michael's Hospital
state: Ontario
Study officials:
affiliation: Unity Health Toronto
name: Venkat Bhat, MD MSc
role: PRINCIPAL_INVESTIGATOR
References:
citation: Nguyen B, Torres A, Sim W, Kenny D, Campbell DM, Beavers L, Lou W, Kapralos B, Peter E, Dubrowski A, Krishnan S, Bhat V. Digital Interventions to Reduce Distress Among Health Care Providers at the Frontline: Protocol for a Feasibility Trial. JMIR Res Protoc. 2022 Feb 16;11(2):e32240. doi: 10.2196/32240.