Effectiveness of a cognitive behavioural therapy app developed for care workers involved in elderly care

Abstract

With the global spread of COVID-19 since 2020, care workers have been subject to serious psychological distress. Older adults are more likely to get severely ill from COVID-19. Therefore, care workers involved in elderly care are required to take strict infection control measures, leading to restrictions and other stressors in their daily lives. Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) has gained attention in recent years as a method for managing stress. With the current spread of COVID-19, online CBT interventions targeting healthcare workers are becoming increasingly common. However, these programs require many sessions implemented over a long period of time and may not be suitable for busy and tired care workers. Therefore, this study seeks to create and examine the effectiveness of a cognitive behavioural therapy-based app that care workers can quickly and easily use at home on a tablet device. The study participants were six care workers (two men and four women; mean age 50.3 11.4 years) who work for a social welfare corporation and provide homevisit care to elderly people. This study was approved by the Tottori University Ethical Review Board. All participants providedwritten informed consent. The app consisted of five modules. The first module comprised a task to enable participants to gain an understanding of the correspondence between thoughts and moods. The second module comprised a task to enable participants to notice negative moods, in which participants looked back on their day and selected the mood they felt most strongly from among the nine negative moods. The third module comprised a task which enabled participants to notice the thoughts that came into their minds, in which participants were asked to put in those thoughts when they were experiencing a negative mood. The app displayed suggestions for typical examples of thoughts corresponding to each mood. The fourth module comprised a task which enabled participants to find rational ways of thinking, in which participants were asked to think of and put in rational thoughts that were different from negative thoughts by thinking about them from a different perspective. The app displayed suggestions for rational thoughts corresponding to each of the moods. The fifth module comprised a task that enabled participants to think about behaviours that they could implement that would make the next day more pleasant. The app provided suggestions for four different ways of thinking about pleasant activities, such as: simple actions, specific actions, things that you want to do instead of things that you ‘should’ do, and actions that match up with your values. The app was configured to require no more than 10 minutes per session.