Families have been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated lockdown, but barely any research has been conducted yet, investigating how COVID-19-related stressorsand, specifically, disruptions in established employment arrangementsaffected couples' relationship quality. To account more comprehensively for such non-monetary costs of the COVID-19 pandemic, the present study investigates whether changes in partners' employment situation during the COVID-19 crisisparticularly home-office and short-time workhad an immediate impact on the relationship satisfaction of cohabiting married and unmarried couples. To do so, we estimated fixed-effects regression models, exploiting unique data from the German Family Panel (pairfam; wave 11) and its supplementary COVID-19 web-survey. We observed a substantial proportion of respondents experiencing positive (20%) or negative (40%) changes in relationship satisfaction during the crisis. Relationship satisfaction has decreased, on average, for men and women alike, almost irrespective of whether they experienced COVID-19-related changes in their employment situation. While partners' employment situation hardly moderated the negative association between respondents' employment and relationship satisfaction, the presence of children seemed to buffer partly against a COVID-19-related decrease. Our results thus confirm previous findings suggesting that the COVID-19 pandemic constitutes a threat to couples' relationship quality and healthy family functioning more generally.
The COVID‐19 pandemic changed health‐care operations around the world and has interrupted standard clinical practices as well as created clinical research challenges for cancer patients. Cancer patients are uniquely susceptible to COVID‐19 infection and have some of the worst outcomes. Importantly, cancer therapeutics could potentially render cancer patients more susceptible to demise from COVID‐19 yet the poor survival outcome of many cancer diagnoses outweighs this risk. In addition, the pandemic has resulted in risks to health‐care workers and research staff driving important change in clinical research operations and procedures. Remote telephone and video visits, remote monitoring, electronic capture of signatures and data, and limiting sample collections have allowed the leadership in our institution to ensure the safety of our staff and patients while continuing critical clinical research operations. Here we discuss some of these unique challenges and our response to change that was necessary to continue cancer clinical research; and, the impacts the pandemic has caused including increases in efficiency for our cancer research office.
Much of today's psychological trauma can be identified as resulting from sudden and seemingly random events, and particularly from events that involve the loss of human life. This article presents a perspective on how behavioral health providers may approach the design, development, and implementation of community-based psychological trauma interventions. These interventions allow those community members most affected by the trauma to play a central role in the resolution of, and community adaptation to, traumatic losses. After a brief discussion of "critical incident stress debriefing"--a common form of psychological "first aid" that is sometimes used following traumatic events that affect a community--the article turns to the description of a community-based trauma-response program that provides a continuum-of-care model for the care and management of individual and group reactions to shared, traumatic events. A recent evaluation of that program, which was developed by the Community Services Program of the Trauma Center in Boston, is presented as an important first step toward determining the types of community-based responses that show promise in our efforts to ameliorate the impact of traumatic events in communities nationwide and internationally.
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