We See You. We Thank You.
Image: (LYDIA ZURAW / KHN)
We see you. We thank you. We honor your sacrifices. We know that you are doing all that you can, and more than you ever expected to have to do on a daily basis, working many hours of overtime for months at a time. Dealing with staff shortages because your coworkers are exhausted, burned out, sick themselves, or gone, like those pictured above in April 2021, when 3600 of you had died from COVID. Dealing with full ICU units devoted to COVID patients, and dealing with a lack of PPE and adequate ventilators and supplies.
A mental health survey of healthcare workers, conducted in June 2020, when things weren't as dire as they are right now, showed that 76% of healthcare workers felt exhausted and burned out.
A study published in October of 2020, almost a year ago, reported that 6% of people hospitalized with COVID were healthcare workers. That has probably gone up by now, as have the number of healthcare workers that have died, but we couldn't locate more recent statistics.
We originally wanted to make this post about self-care for healthcare workers, but when do you have the time? When can you take a couple of weeks off to go to the beach or the mountains? When can you squeeze in a massage or a trip to the spa? When can you just be, and enjoy life without thinking about what you will face again when you return to work? It seemed pretentious on our part to think you can just switch off when you walk out of the hospital and switch back on when they call you back to work an extra shift a short few hours later.
We can't make it better. We can't make people take a vaccine. We can't make people maintain social distancing. We can't make people wear a mask when they go to the store. I wish we could, but we can't. So instead, we will just do our own part, in our own little corner of the world, and say again, thank you for what you are doing. We appreciate you more than we can say.
Posted In:
COVID