Les dispositifs groupaux à l’hôpital et en EHPAD durant la crise de la Covid-19. Quelles demandes, quelles offres, quels apports ?

Abstract

Introduction

The COVID-19 crisis has exacerbated the demand for group arrangements dedicated to healthcare professionals and more widely hospital and medicosocial staff.

Objective

This article attempts to shed light on the issues at stake in the opening of group settings, between supply and demand, as well as their main organizational and psychological contributions and limitations, through the synthesis of multiple feedbacks from group arrangements carried out by clinical psychologists and researchers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Method

Six female researcher-clinicians met to discuss their experiences in setting up group care facilities. The analysis of the feedback used the concepts of work psychodynamics and group psychoanalysis, making it possible to bring out the organizational and psychological characteristics of group arrangements dedicated to professionals in the healthcare sector.

Results

Our results show that the group arrangement, by allowing the sharing of experiences, helps the mutual recognition between professionals, and thus new identifications in order to avoid the fragmentation of work collectives. The most central point seems to be the capacity of group arrangements to deal with the aggressiveness and anger felt when facing the powerlessness to act in crisis situations. The limits of these groups concern their difficulty in allowing individual rather than collective words to be expressed, and the risk of being the site of a repetition of the trauma for the professionals who sometimes attack or flee from these mechanisms, for fear of what they might bring back to the surface.

Conclusion

Several points of vigilance and recommendations from the experiences reported in this article are explained, in order to enlighten and guide future group facilitators when offering group arrangements built with and for professionals in the healthcare field.