Healthcare. A heated topic regardless of party lines. Pro-life, pro-choice. Anti-Affordable Care Act, pro-ACA. Privatization, nationalization. But there is one elephant in the room: the stress on healthcare workers. It has been the spotlight the entire pandemic.
Everything is in shortage, especially with the amount of healthcare workers that are excessively overworked and burned out. Healthleaders.com say that the burnout rates before the coronavirus pandemic, healthcare worker burnout rates on average ranged from 30% to 50%. Now, burnout rates range from 40% to 70%. This is concerning. Amongst newer nurses, there are many leaving the profession and retiring early with burnout rates between 30% and 60%. This I believe is the result of the lack of care for our medical field. It is where the demand for healthcare professionals are at an all-time high while the supply of them is increasingly low.
Though the Healthcare Management of Southern Illinois University finds that if hospital get increasingly more competitive, the quality-of-care increases, but is that so? I personally find that doubtful this is applicable in this age of the pandemic. It is good progress that according to the AAMC (Association of American Medical College) the applicants to medical school as of this school year has increased 17.8%.
I feel it is not enough. I think we as a culture need to somehow value our workers and what they do for us. I am surrounded by people who work in healthcare and the horrors of working in health disturb me. My mother, a nurse, has mentioned how insurance companies force her to kill her patients softly as a means of making money. These sentiments are echoed by a friend I mentor, Ksenia, who wishes to enter medical school, has said the industry has, “Human rights abuses against vulnerable people that makes a war criminal blush.” Which makes it very discouraging to enter medical school.
Though it is opening up slightly, it is hard to listen to the complaints of all of those around me in a collapsing foundation for the health of the future. It is almost as if those in power wish for us to suffocate to our deaths. This is not promising with how our systems continue to lead us to our deaths. Were we not led to believe that science is the future? While we kill almost everyone around us before they have a chance to see it?
Maternal deaths in the US are double that of other developed nations according to the Commonwealth Fund. This is because we managed to convince ourselves that a zygote is a living being yet make it so that detracts funding to everything around it.
We choked out the medical field and what it can provide for us. Somehow, we must start supporting our healthcare workers in a real, tangible way instead of showing them off as martyrs for our health when we cannot even keep the majority alive. There would be a certain mindset needed to sustain oneself in the medical field, which I believe is rather unhealthy. I wish for healthcare workers to be able to live full lives without the weight of being powerless and can see that they are truly changing lives for the better. If you want to keep calling them heroes, you better treat them with the professionals are at an all-time high while the supply of them is increasingly low.
Though the Healthcare Management of Southern Illinois University finds that if hospital get increasingly more competitive, the quality-of-care increases, but is that so? I personally find that doubtful this is applicable in this age of the pandemic. It is good progress that according to the AAMC (Association of American Medical College) the applicants to medical school as of this school year has increased 17.8%. I feel it is not enough. I think we as a culture need to somehow value our workers and what they do for us. I am surrounded by people who work in healthcare and the horrors of working in health disturb me. My mother, a nurse, has mentioned how insurance companies force her to kill her patients softly as a means of making money.
These respect they should have outside of when you need it and cannot find the healthcare you need simply from the morale of the workers by continuing to let this infrastructure discourage promising medics from helping us. Similar to how we allow doctors to dictate everything about a prescription that go against FDA guidelines and never seeking to improve ourselves similar to how we treat other systems.
This pandemic has uncovered much of our failings in our healthcare and other industries. Though I wish we can soon build a brighter future for those who help and the helpless.
As a nation, have mercy on the breathing and do anything in your power to keep yourself and others alive. We will sacrifice everyone if we allow the continued exhaustion to oppress our health field.
