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Healthcare Workers Are Done
It isn’t just me and my cohort at the hospital where I work that are feeling the pressure. “One year ago, we were heroes. Now, we’re back to being the evil nurses who ruin everything”, paraphrased from a coworker. In talking to other nurses, I hear much of the same. “People are acting crazy. Families. Patients.”
After the stress of the pandemic, we’re at the tail end glimpsing the light at the end of this never-ending tunnel. Instead of being welcomed back into society and cared for as the wounded that we are, the veterans of the War Against COVID are finding out that there is no respite. COVID is ending, but the battle for our selves and our health is just beginning. Many simply will not do it any longer.
The Washington Post even deigned to cover the impending loss of services, as the caregivers we have become so reliant upon and have taken for granted, finally decide that enough is enough. The nurses that were pushing through retirement to get just a few more years are starting to weigh the risks and are determining that the cost is too high for one more year of pay. Doctors are deciding that the stress, the paperwork, the bureaucracy, and the loss is just too much to withstand any longer.
These Australians show some of the less gory marks that have literally scarred us.
This pandemic wounded our entire nation, partly due to the never-ending, depressive death-ticker on news sources like CNN and MSNBC. Our medical workers, seeing it first hand, were surrounded by it at every moment. While those not in the field panicked or hid from it, those who saw it every day could do neither. Those in the field were confronted every single waking moment with no escape. The “benefits” of the pandemic (people finally vocally and openly appreciating healthcare workers of all stripes), including nice little 10% discounts or coupons, and cards written by the schoolchildren, were still reminders of the pressures. We focused almost exclusively on the patients’ needs, the families’, and the toll on society. We made a point about the pressures of the masks on the faces of the nurses and doctors. But then as COVID numbers started to wane, the discounts were removed, the cards no longer came, the dust settled upon the “Our Workers are Healthcare Heroes!” signs, and all reminders of the recent lethal past started to be shuffled back into some closet in favor of promoting cleanliness, sanitization, and a return to normal (profitable) services.
In the meantime, collective society has PTSD. People can no longer function normally and they have little patience or understanding for even the most minor of inconveniences. Though the mainstream media (previously called “the news”) acts like the recent shootings are vastly abnormal signs of a cry for better gun control laws, they neglect the signs of a nation in distress(emphasis mine):
Intrusive memories
Symptoms of intrusive memories may include:
- Recurrent, unwanted distressing memories of the traumatic event
- Reliving the traumatic event as if it were happening again (flashbacks)
- Upsetting dreams or nightmares about the traumatic event
- Severe emotional distress or physical reactions to something that reminds you of the traumatic event
Avoidance
Symptoms of avoidance may include:
- Trying to avoid thinking or talking about the traumatic event
- Avoiding places, activities or people that remind you of the traumatic event
Negative changes in thinking and mood
Symptoms of negative changes in thinking and mood may include:
- Negative thoughts about yourself, other people or the world
- Hopelessness about the future
- Memory problems, including not remembering important aspects of the traumatic event
- Difficulty maintaining close relationships
- Feeling detached from family and friends
- Lack of interest in activities you once enjoyed
- Difficulty experiencing positive emotions
- Feeling emotionally numb
Changes in physical and emotional reactions
Symptoms of changes in physical and emotional reactions (also called arousal symptoms) may include:
- Being easily startled or frightened
- Always being on guard for danger
- Self-destructive behavior, such as drinking too much or driving too fast
- Trouble sleeping
- Trouble concentrating
- Irritability, angry outbursts or aggressive behavior
- Overwhelming guilt or shame
While the Mayo Clinic makes these symptoms very clear, on a societal level we are experiencing broad PTSD and are taking it out on our Healthcare Heroes, as well as everybody else. While restrictions loosen, people are more tightly wound than ever.
Ultimately, if we do not, as a nation make the choice to come together and do some serious introspection and healing, we will lose our Healthcare workers permanently. Many will only serve as long as they see a crisis. As the pandemic becomes another footnote in American history, more and more clinical staff will move away from patient care and bedside services in order to retire or to simply recover from their personal trauma in another field.
Please understand. These are people who have worked previously with death, great personal stress, great moral distress at patients’ care, and have managed to justify it to themselves and push through. Many have done this for many, many years and have felt fulfilled by it. After a year of this, many of them are done pushing.
Permanently.
As long as we continue to treat our Healthcare workers as we do and act as if they are heroes one moment and expendable the next; as long as we continue to literally abuse our Healthcare workers, we will find that the only ones who will take the abuse are either working with an expiration date looming, or that they are not the kind of people that we want providing compassionate care to ourselves and our families. Perhaps even more frighteningly, as long as we continue to treat them this way and the Healthcare workers are no longer shamed into silence, people will find out.
Some of those people might no longer go into nursing school or medical school or decide to get their phlebotomy certificate.
Some of those people might no longer decide that the money is worth the trade in health.
Some of those people might decide to learn to code.
And the rest of us will learn that humans can never be heroes all day, all night, day in, day out. The rest of us will learn that while we might call them “Angels”, they are fragile. And despite their overwhelming strength, can still be broken.
Not everything that breaks can be put back together again.
Published in Healthcare
Sign me up for avoidance. I avoid news reports on TV, because I’ve had all I can take of having nonsensical numeric data being spouted by blow-dried bimbos.
There is an old bit of doggerel that applies to health-care workers as well as the soldiers about whom it is written:
God and the soldier alike are adored
When danger’s at hand and not before.
Once danger is past both alike are requited.
God is forgotten and the soldier slighted.
I know I’m done.
I ‘m 65 and baring unforeseen circumstances I’m taking my 40 years of clinical experience and hanging it up around the new year.
Reminds me of Kiplings Tommy
Yes, makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep Is cheaper than them uniforms, an' they're starvation cheap; An' hustlin' drunken soldiers when they're goin' large a bit Is five times better business than paradin' in full kit. Then it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, 'ow's yer soul?" But it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll, The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll, O it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll. We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too, But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you; An' if sometimes our conduck isn't all your fancy paints, Why, single men in barricks don't grow into plaster saints; While it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, fall be'ind", But it's "Please to walk in front, sir", when there's trouble in the wind, There's trouble in the wind, my boys, there's trouble in the wind, O it's "Please to walk in front, sir", when there's trouble in the wind. You talk o' better food for us, an' schools, an' fires, an' all: We'll wait for extry rations if you treat us rational. Don't mess about the cook-room slops, but prove it to our face The Widow's Uniform is not the soldier-man's disgrace. For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Chuck him out, the brute!" But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot; An' it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' anything you please; An' Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool -- you bet that Tommy sees!The one I quoted is older. It dates back to the early 1700s – after Queen Anne’s War.
Not to minimize the stresses on healthcare workers but couldn’t it be argued that the last year has been much more devastating on others, small businesses owners and police in particular, to say nothing of patients.
The relationship between healthcare workers and patients is an adversarial relationship, thanks to Medicare and Obamacare. Doesn’t mean we need to be rude to each other, but our goals do not always coincide wth theirs as much as they could.
All I got is “Congratulations”. Enjoy your retirement, but hang around ricochet for a while longer.
I’m out.
You know what else is out? Your face!
People are crazy from spending too much time on social media and not enough time with real people. Social media is designed to be addictive and it is harmful. No different than what the tobacco companies produced. Somebody should sue them.
Awww, man. You will be missed. It’s nice to bow out while you’re still on your game, but I totally get it.
Sure. That could be argued of any field. However, I don’t know any business owners who were effectively made to work overtime in poor conditions, while being given inadequate supplies AND being told/knowing that if they didn’t people would *literally* die.
While business owners have their own lamentations and deserve their own space to mourn, we have fixated, as a society, strongly on unemployment. We have fixated on the closing of businesses. We have fixated on the unemployment rate. While all this things are important, healthcare workers were regularly told to do more with less at the cost of their own health and sanity….or else they were horrible people, horrible nures/doctors/whatever. While other people got extra unemployment benefits, this staff was the only family many of the hospitalized had. They had few resources and many permanently damaged their bodies.
All of this while being, more or less, treated as a part of the machine.
Sure, businesses are important. But show me where they worked, got sick (got penalized for being sick/injured) and promptly got forgotten.
Chalk that up to the FDA and CDC who refused to approve treatments with approved generic drugs. Go vomit all over Fauci.
I would need an entire post’s space to discuss everywhere Fauci failed. He failed a lot.
But that’s been true for years. So what’s different now?
But he managed to be famous, powerful and extremely well paid. And he helped sink Trump and get the Democrats in Power!
The imprecatory Psalms make so much sense to me now.
The personal misery index is pretty high for a lot of industries, healthcare workers included but no healthcare worker anywhere has had is worse than cops in Seattle, LA, Portland, Minneapolis or other cities where officials basically called them enemies of people. Nobody threw molotov cocktails at ICU nurses, or blinded them with lasers.
As for small businesses, they simply had to sit at home, empty their savings, fire all their employees, absorb their debt and watch their life’s work fade away. I’m sure many of them would have prefer to trade current situations.
As for patients, many of them were denied visiting their sick relatives, burying their family members, being with their spouses for their child’s birth, getting treatment for “non-essential” issues. For healthcare workers to bemoan their predicament as somehow more painful that those who they treat seems to fly in the face of their mission in the first place.
Doing more with less is a term many industries know well, most of them work with dirt under their nails with little or no accolades.
Of course none of that is to say you shouldn’t be pissed. If I were you I’d be in a fighting mood too, but let’s turn that anger toward those responsible for bringing misery on all of those groups by not playing their dumb games anymore, and going back to embracing things like freedom and science and rejecting Covidiot policies across the societal spectrum.
Amen.
It is…but it also isn’t. As a nurse, my job is to do the best for the patient. I do not get involved with insurance, Medicare, and what can/can’t be billed. During the hospital stay, it’s pretty carte blanche. It is more of the after-care and prescriptions to go home that are impacted by the choice of insurance. More often than not, it isn’t adversarial. Not with the doctors, nor the nurses, nor he therapists. But it is with the insurance companies.
We often groan when we hear the recommendations at discharge for a patient and then hear the common reply for the case managers “They’re XYZ”. The moment we hear it, we know that they won’t get the best care because they always deny requests for certain things. We all know it and it’s unfair to the patients that we often fight so hard for. I have a hard time working bedside, but I cannot imagine the internal distress as a Utilization Management Nurse, whose job it is to provide rationale for denial of services.
The insurance companies have a stronger hand in what is done or not done.
Well, Vince, I was very clearly speaking deliberately about Healthcare workers and the impact that it is going to make losing 30% of the industry.
If you’d like me to post about the dumpster fire that 2020 was in general, I’m afraid that is an entirely different topic for another post. While you are concerned about everyone else, I’m taking a small sample of the population and attempting to explain some of their own trauma and how it is going to impact everyone for years to come.
Having lost three family members during COVID, I feel the pain of “the families” very intensely. I was not allowed to visit my family while they were dying in the hospital or were in hospice care at a facility. I was finally allowed bedside for one hour while we withdrew care from another family member; but only because I was the DPOA for healthcare. While you seem to exclude healthcare workers from the category of “patients”, I’d like to reassure you that healthcare workers also had their services delayed, appointments canceled, their spouses denied entrance for labor (though this only happened very, very minimally in very few cases, though it was well-broadcasted).
Equating the turmoil caused by BLM with COVID and then using it to strengthen your argument is exceptionally weak. However, nurses were accosted after work or before work for daring to wear their scrubs out in public (if you wanted to talk about public outrage and violence).
While everyone has recognized the economic and financial impact on small businesses and workers, I am attempting to redirect some of this recognition toward Healthcare, particularly with the knowledge that this pandemic has influenced many to retire or leave the field. I am not trying to say which is worse or to have a “poor me” contest. I am trying to say that Healthcare workers were not heard before, are still not heard, and are finally giving up.
And it will come around to you, me, and everyone else.
Now do cops.
Noted, and I’m glad many of your colleagues are done with the dog and pony show. Let’s team up in convincing the rest of them to take off the masks, stop with all the anti-healthcare measures and encourage them to take their industry back.
I’m sorry:
My husband is dead. Not so much from the pandemic (it’s not even listed as a complicating factor on his death certificate, for which I’m grateful).
Still, it’s not made any more bearable because of COVID, only because I couldn’t even put him into the car and drive him around to his favorite places for the last few months of his life as I couldn’t guarantee that we’d find a restroom that he could use when the need arose.
Yeah. My own “personal misery index” is pretty high.
Oh lordy. That’s gonna be a long post and unfortunately, I have little personal insight beyond knowing a few cops. I would love a cop to chime in and to talk about that. I do know that the suicide rate among cops has increased and I would expect that the rate of people wanting to be cops has reduced while the requirements for serving on the police force are getting more and more strict.
Again, while wanting police reform and for cops to all wear cameras is a good place to start, it is important not to vilify the humans who do a difficult and necessary job under pressure. All of this talk of social workers coming in to de-escalate? Sheeeeesh. When someone has a knife and is swinging it around, we’ve passed de-escalation time. Lethal force is justly met with lethal force. It is unfortunate and often tragic. And yes, mistakes are made. But these people are human and will often be traumatized by their mistakes for their entire lives. It is beyond me how people want to throw them in jail for things that they did in the line of duty as if it were premeditated murder.
Cops do some of the hardest jobs and work with some of the most difficult people; their coworkers and the public. They often see some of the ugliest side of humanity and still manage to retain some of theirs. It is honestly miraculous that they are able to do so.
As a part of police reform, I would actually provide more funding to the police for psych services in order to increase their ability to maintain perspective and compassion and to treat the welling despair that many of them feel. It would help them to have the capacity to talk people down as well as to process a lot of the horrible things they deal with on a daily basis, perhaps even reducing some of the ongoing hyperarousal every time they make a stop or every time someone reaches.
My friends who are officers are some of the best human beings I know. I rarely ever talk to them about the job. I do not know who they do talk to about it and I often worry about them. Compartmentalization is often necessary, but humans are still not capable of completely cutting one one part of themselves from the rest, regardless of how good they might become at it. Eventually, some will seep through at inopportune times.
We really cannot expect people in these difficult jobs to be perfect. Yes, people’s lives are on the line. Yes, they/we strive for perfection. But as long as people are human, there will be mistakes and some will have fatal consequences. It will always be a tragedy for all parties involved.
If you’d like a (often times really unfair) perspective on it, look at YouTube, TikTok and other places with the tag #TheLastPizzaParty. I’ve noted some really unfair painting of hospital administrators there.
What it comes down to, really, is that it is everyone’s jobs to take healthcare back. It is everyone’s job to look at this and say to themselves, “Hey. These people are human beings. They need 30 minutes to eat lunch by themselves. They need 10 minutes to pee every 5 hours or so. Why are we not giving that to them?” It’s everyone’s job to look at their hospital and to look at their staff and to think about what is going on behind the scenes. It’s everyone’s job to say, “Hey. I’m paying for services. I’m not paying for that soulless look in their eyes. What the hell are you doing to them?” It’s everyone’s job to make sure that the workers are getting the opportunity to eat, sleep, and perform their necessary biological functions. It’s everyone’s job to look at their hospitals and notice what is happening. Instead of complaining that the nurse is too busy to hold your hand or to explain procedures, it’s our job to find out: how many patients does she have? Why? Is that hospital policy or state law?
And it is our job to insist on safe healthcare practices for everyone. I don’t want a tired nurse that’s been overworked. I’m terrified of what care must be like in states other than California.
We need, as a country, to reform hospital care. Yes, costs will be cut in different areas, etc, etc, etc. But we need to look at what we really want, need, and are willing to tolerate. Some of that will be a little less laissez-faire than most of us would like. While we’re writing laws like Obamacare and enforcing measures for digital recordkeeping including one’s preferred gender identity, perhaps we can write a few that link federal funds to whether or not staff get off-duty lunches and their 10 minute breaks. Perhaps we can actually investigate these hospitals that intimidate their staff into confirming with each punch that “yes, I got my regularly scheduled breaks as mandated by law”, to determine whether or not it is happening (it’s not).
You mean the ones that don’t work? Like HCQ?
https://www.cochrane.org/news/chloroquine-or-hydroxychloroquine-useful-treating-people-covid-19-or-preventing-infection
if you want to complain pick some real issues -like about how a certain Administration used the national reserve of PPE for a minor outbreak & then didn’t replenish it (I won’t say who but it starts with Obama and ends with Biden). The National ppe reserve was set up by a president they consider an idiot-GWB-who was smart enough to establish it.
Yeah. There’s plenty of blame to go around about the various ways the pandemic has been handled: from the Governors to the President, it’s been a complete it-show. Now, do I expect them to know how to handle a new and emerging disease terribly well? Not really. Knowing what we know about government already, I expect them to either overcompensate or attempt to play it down to reduce panic. Both happened.
The important thing here is to recognize that both happened and make plans for the future for actual roll-out, testing, and doing our own control measures instead of relying on international bodies that may/may not be impacted by politics.
Same here. My family members (I’m intentionally being nondescript, my apologies on that part) were isolated for months before they died. They rarely went out, but when they did, it was great joy. The lack of bathrooms and of even slight services made their lives difficult, even more closed, and dark during the times when they needed it most. Ultimately, they were isolated and died. I would say that two of the three died in part due to the isolation, resulting from the measures to avoid COVID.
I know COVID was awful; this disease itself is awful. But the fallout around all of society has been so intense that it has made an indelible mark upon all of us.
I would really appreciate if some of the Ricochetti who are mental health workers were able to describe the fallout from their perspective; the research is slow in coming (if at all) and much of it will be relegated to anecdotes due to the slant in the Peer Reviewed Literature Scene.
Also, I wanted to say: I am so sorry for your loss. It is an awful time to lose someone, particularly someone as important as your husband. Words will never suffice to convey how my heart aches for you and I want you to know that you will be in my prayers tonight.
All that stuff is just a smokescreen. The goal is to federalize the police, a project that really picked up early in the Clinton administration, and continued under W Bush and Obama. When it’s complete we’ll have police brutality that we can’t do anything about. The stuff about race is just a squirrel to draw attention away from the real action.