The Ebola Outbreak: A Short Guide To Supporting Your Team

Chief Clinical Officer // DR. MATT EDWARDS

Psychosocial & Wellbeing Lead // BEN PORTER

If your team is responding to, or impacted by, the current outbreak, you might be wondering how best to support them. Drawing on past research and shared experience, DR. MATT EDWARDS and BEN PORTER provide some medical and psychosocial guidance.

A comprehensive ‘duty of care’ can save lives. During the 2014 Ebola outbreak, health workers faced an infection rate of between 3–4.4%. However, for staff deployed with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) it was just 0.4%. This was found to be the direct result of MSF’s ‘duty of care’ policy, which went well beyond standard infection control. This kind of staff protection means proactively conducting detailed risk analyses before hiring or deployment, meticulously organising work practices to limit exposure, communicating risks clearly so staff can give true informed consent, and guaranteeing robust medical and psychosocial follow-up for any illness or injury.

If you are sending staff to respond prepare them for the harsh realities. Staff are often motivated to deploy for strong moral reasons and for their own personal development. But the reality on the ground can be overwhelming. Pre-deployment training is crucial and is generally viewed positively by staff. However, it is vital that this training goes beyond logistics. Ensure your preparation specifically equips all staff members to deal with death, profound suffering, and their own fears about contagion. You might like to consider our e-learning course Supporting Staff In High Risk, Insecure Environments.

Ensure your team has predeployment medical and resilience assessments. Health workers entering an Ebola crisis face extreme physical hazards and profound emotional trauma that require important baseline health and resilience. Medically, responders often operate in under-resourced environments lacking basic protective equipment, making them up to 32 times more likely to contract the deadly virus than the general population. Psychologically, frontline workers endure intense stress stemming from the constant fear of personal infection, the trauma of watching infected colleagues die, and crippling stigmatisation or isolation from the very communities they are trying to help. A pre-deployment medical ensures a level of health and resilience before deployment. And a Resilience Questionnaire & Consultation allows workers to consider their coping strategies. They should also travel with all the necessary medical supplies (e.g. antimalarials, first aid kits) to avoid putting pressure on local health facilities and putting themselves at greater risk of infection.

Consider sending some of your team on our Family Liaison In a Crisis training, to ensure families are kept well informed. For local staff, families are not simply worried about their loved one’s safety from a distance — they are living in the same outbreak. Practical support is important too e.g. access to health information, referral pathways, guidance on household protective measures. National staff and their families can also frequently face stigma e.g. social avoidance and in some cases difficulties for children at school. Proactive community-facing communication from organisations can help reduce this stigma. At the same time, it is worth being honest about what INGOs can and cannot do. Stigma is systemic, community networks are complex, and the assumption that local staff have rich informal support structures to fall back on often proves wrong — those networks are frequently fractured by the same loss and fear the outbreak has caused.

Check-in with your team. Research shows that when your staff are in the field, they will often self-censor their communications to avoid worrying their loved ones. Because of this, they often carry the emotional burden of the crisis alone. HR, managers and leaders should provide independent support networks and check-ins, so your team has a safe space to share their unfiltered experiences.

Use scheduled rest and rotation as clinical tools, not perks. Heat stress, decision fatigue, and emotional exhaustion can degrade clinical judgement and infection control compliance. MSF’s human resource measures included scheduled rest and days off, and clear job profiles to support a positive safety climate. Rotation schedules should be protected and treated as non-negotiable. We strongly recommend this is systematised in order to reduce risk and care for staff. 

Create opportunities for uplifting moments. While managing a crisis involves significant stressors, it is also filled with moments of profound hope. During past Ebola responses, staff found great strength in seeing patients improve and receiving thanks from community members.

Watch for moral injury, not just burnout. National staff are frequently working in their own communities — treating neighbours, making triage decisions that affect people they know, navigating cultural and traditional burial practices that conflict with clinical requirements. This creates a particular moral injury risk that is distinct from standard occupational stress. Supervisors should be trained to recognise it.

Watch out for clinical perfectionism. Humanitarian work naturally carries a heavy moral weight, making every task feel non-negotiable. When staff expect their perfect performance to create perfect outcomes in a chaotic crisis, they risk experiencing “failed reciprocity”—a deep sense of exhaustion and embitterment when things inevitably go wrong. Be vigilant for overwork masquerading as a noble virtue. This doesn’t mean lowering standards; it means encouraging “good enough” pacing and helping staff recognise that rigid perfectionism isn’t actually helping them succeed. You might like to explore our training on managing perfectionism here.

Try to manage staff’s return from responding to the crisis. The end of the job brings its own challenges. It is very common for staff to experience a sudden loss of motivation. And many past Ebola responders reported being avoided by friends and family due to misplaced fears of contagion. As HR and leadership, you can protect your returning staff by proactively educating others in the organisation and the community about the low risk posed by responders on their return. Or you could arrange for a psychosocial debrief which will create a safe space with a trained therapist for a group or individual to reflect on and process thoughts and feelings following their trip. We would also recommend spaces for debriefing for local staff either individually or collective spaces to process the intensity of the work and its impact on wellbeing.

Build peer support and wellbeing roles into the team structure from the start. Formal wellbeing infrastructure should be embedded at field level, not held at a distance in a headquarters or regional office. This means naming specific people as wellbeing focal points within teams, training peer supporters who can offer a first layer of human connection and signposting, and considering a structured buddy system so that no one is carrying their experience entirely alone. A buddy pairing creates a low-threshold, non-hierarchical space for daily check-ins that doesn’t require someone to formally seek help. Wellbeing support that requires escalating through a management chain will simply not be used when people need it most. The goal is to make support lateral, accessible, and normal — something woven into how the team operates, not something bolted on for people who are struggling. We provide this in our Wellbeing Champion training.

Highlight the profound moral value and the personal benefits of this work. Highlight the profound moral value and personal benefits of this work. Research on Ebola responders found moral purpose and personal development, not career advancement, were the biggest reasons people chose to deploy. As a manager, name this explicitly: remind your team why the work counts, and be specific about the skills they’re gaining, not just the toll. Create space to hear about outcomes and impact, since these sustain motivation through harder moments. Death, suffering, and fear of contagion remain the most common stressors, so check in on these specifically — and remember family tension and cross-organisational friction can add to the load too.

If you or your team need help navigating a deployment or recovering from a crisis, please click here to explore what support we can offer you now.