Clinicians and researchers at Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center documented their experiences in the early weeks of the COVID-19 outbreak in King County, Washington. Their report offers lessons from clinical and research personnel, patients, and peer interventionists during the evolving pandemic response in an early US COVID-19 epicenter.

The article, published online in Psychiatry, presents a case series of experiences of frontline clinical and research teams in incorporating COVID-19 prevention strategies in the context of an ongoing comparative effectiveness trial of multidisciplinary, peer-integrated care coordination for patients with severe injury. The report also describes key themes from qualitative data collected during daily team meetings for the Trauma Survivors Outcomes and Support (TSOS) study, a pragmatic clinical trial also underway at Harborview. TSOS, an NIH Collaboratory Trial, is a stepped-wedge, cluster randomized pragmatic trial testing the delivery of screening and intervention strategies for patients with posttraumatic stress disorder and comorbid conditions at 24 level I trauma centers in the United States.

The case series offers evidence that primary and secondary prevention strategies can be integrated into ongoing clinical and research interventions during pandemic response. Procedures can also be developed to support team members who are adapting to rapidly changing individual, organizational, and societal demands.

This work was supported in part by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). TSOS is supported within the NIH Collaboratory by a cooperative agreement from the National Institute of Mental Health and by the NIH Common Fund through a cooperative agreement from the Office of Strategic Coordination within the Office of the NIH Director.

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