Abstract
Background The COVID‑19 pandemic has negatively affected the mental health of international migrant workers (IMWs). IMWs experience multiple barriers to accessing mental health care. Two scalable interventions developed by the World Health Organization (WHO) were adapted to address some of these barriers: Doing What Matters in times of stress (DWM), a guided self‑help web application, and Problem Management Plus (PM +), a brief facilitator‑ led program to enhance coping skills. This study examines whether DWM and PM + remotely delivered as a stepped‑ care programme (DWM/PM +) is effective and cost‑effective in reducing psychological distress, among Polish migrant workers with psychological distress living in the Netherlands. Methods The stepped‑care DWM/PM + intervention will be tested in a two‑arm, parallel‑group, randomized con‑ trolled trial (RCT) among adult Polish migrant workers with self‑reported psychological distress (Kessler Psychological Distress Scale; K10 > 15.9). Participants (n = 212) will be randomized into either the intervention group that receives DWM/PM + with psychological first aid (PFA) and care‑as‑usual (enhanced care‑as‑usual or eCAU), or into the con‑ trol group that receives PFA and eCAU‑only (1:1 allocation ratio). Baseline, 1‑week post‑DWM (week 7), 1‑week post‑PM + (week 13), and follow‑up (week 21) self‑reported assessments will be conducted. The primary outcome is psychological distress, assessed with the Patient Health Questionnaire Anxiety and Depression Scale (PHQ‑ADS). Secondary outcomes are self‑reported symptoms of depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), *Correspondence: Rinske Roos r.roos@vu.nl Full list of author information is available at the end of the article Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http:// creat iveco mmons. org/ licen ses/ by/4. 0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http:// creat iveco mmons. org/ publi cdoma in/ zero/1. 0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. Roos et al. BMC Psychiatry (2023) 23:801 Page 2 of 14 resilience, quality of life, and cost‑effectiveness. In a process