Tag: Health Care Workers

Sisaket,Thailand,09 April 2019;Medical staff wearing face shield and medical mask for protect coronavirus covid-19 virus in CT scan room,Sisaket province,Thailand,ASIA.

The Future of Acute and Critical Care Nursing

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By Sarah A. Delgado

We need to change the future for nurses. Even before the pandemic, nurses suffered high rates of burnout and a disproportionate risk of suicide. But the pandemic could be a tipping point that leads many nurses to change careers, leave their jobs, or retire early.

Moral distress, the consequence of feeling constrained from taking ethical action, was well-documented before the pandemic, particularly among critical care nurses providing end-of-life care. Additional research conducted before 2020 demonstrates that nurses were experiencing post-traumatic stress due to the suffering they witnessed and the demands of their work.

During the pandemic, surges in critically ill patients have led to untenable workloads. The distress of end-of-life care is heightened by restrictions on visitation and increased mortality rates. In addition, shortages of basic personal protective equipment contribute to fear and a sense of betrayal.

While the pre-pandemic state of the nursing profession was concerning, the pandemic creates imminent peril.

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basketball on court

Sports Medicine in the Era of COVID-19

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By Brian Feeley and William Levine

The world of sports and sports medicine offers a valuable window into understanding key developments in the COVID-19 pandemic and the broader health and equity issues at play.

Sports medicine, the practice of keeping athletes of all abilities in their peak through a combination of surgery, rehabilitation, and medications, has grown exponentially in the past few decades, with a concomitant rise in the popularity of professional and recreational sports.

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A patient is seen in the intensive care unit for the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Thoracic Diseases Hospital of Athens in Greece on November 8, 2020.

Learning During the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Importance of Humanism in Medicine

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By John C. Messinger

On March 17, 2020, in the first days of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) released a statement strongly urging medical schools to pause all clinical rotations and patient-facing activities.

While there was a clear necessity to limit student participation as a means of reserving PPE and creating a safe environment for patients and health care providers, restricting medical students from clinical settings has drastically changed their education.

As a first-year medical student removed from training at the time of this announcement, my greatest fear has been that these changes will alter my approach to care for patients.

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DUQUE DE CAXIAS,(BRAZIL),MAY,20,2020: doctors take care of patients with covid-19.

The Future of Medicine Post-COVID: Not a Healthy Outlook for Women

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By Laura Dean, Valerie Dobiesz, and Peter Chai

During the COVID-19 pandemic, women health care providers have not only put their health at risk, but also suffered disproportionate professional consequences.

Women comprise 70% of the global and 76% of the US health care workforce, and data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) suggest that nearly three-quarters of the COVID-19 cases among health care workers are women. Additionally, pregnant health care workers suffer greater morbidity and mortality from COVID-19, face uncertain risk from medications and vaccines due to exclusion from clinical trials, and experience significant psychological and medical risk managing pregnancy amidst an uncertain pandemic. Returning to work in an era where limited and ill-fitting personal protective equipment (PPE) is available and risk of infection is uncertain is especially challenging to new and lactating mothers seeking to advance their careers in academic medicine.

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Medical staff work in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) for COVID-19 patients in University Hospital of Liege in Belgium on May 5th, 2020.

Pandemic Highlights Need for Better Redeployment Planning

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By Cory Hoeferlin

In the midst of an unprecedented public health crisis, physicians in all specialties want to assist their frontline colleagues.

Yet after being removed from critical care environments for countless years, many are no longer comfortable when lives hang in the balance.

Putting aside the impending physician-shortage for a moment, a key issue laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic is not workforce capacity, but capability.

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NEW YORK, NEW YORK - JUNE 06, 2020: A health care professional kneels in protest in New York City as part of the movement, 'White Coats for Black Lives,' during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Scope Creep: Serving Many Roles, Health Care Providers Need a Supporting Cast

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By Christian Rose

During the COVID-19 pandemic, physicians and nurses have found themselves on the frontlines of more than just medical care, advocating for their patients, their families, and themselves. Facing overwhelm and burnout at a scale hitherto unimagined, they continue to fulfill their ethical obligations to their communities and their patients. If they don’t, who will?

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Doctor Holding Cell Phone. Cell phones and other kinds of mobile devices and communications technologies are of increasing importance in the delivery of health care. Photographer Daniel Sone.

Providing Cancer Care in the Age of COVID-19

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By Samyukta Mullangi, Johnetta Blakeley, and Stephen Schleicher

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought many challenges to oncology care; an area of medicine that typically involves frequent, in-person patient visits to complete a course of treatment.

In many ways, COVID-19 has served as a stress test for the specialty, and has catalyzed adaptive changes that we hope will make the oncology care, and the health care system in general, more resilient going forward.

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Oxygen mask as part of artificial lungs ventilation machine in surgery room, closeup.

Pandemic Highlights Need for Quality and Equity in End-of-Life Care

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By Elizabeth Clayborne

I was a little less than six months pregnant when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020. As an Emergency Physician, I am well aware of additional risks that my job often exposes me to on a daily basis. We frequently face physical and emotional strife from unstable psychiatric patients, critically ill nursing home residents, sexual assault victims, and newly diagnosed cancer patients.

People who work in an emergency department tend to understand what comes with the territory: a lot of hard work, unexpected outcomes, and daily traverses of the human experience, from the best emotions you can imagine, to lowest depths of human despair. This is what accompanies caring for every ailment for people from all walks of life. I actually love this part about my job! I never know what I’m going to see when I walk through the doors.

That said, being a frontline physician during COVID-19 has provided me with a profoundly different lens on the pressures surrounding health care workers. And experiencing this while pregnant was pretty terrifying.

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New York City, New York / USA - May 2 2020: New York City healthcare workers during coronavirus outbreak in America.

Pandemic Threatens Future of Emergency Medical Services

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By Benjamin Podsiadlo

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed persistent, wide-ranging existential threats to effective 911 emergency response.

The EMS (Emergency Medical Services) system, which sits at the intersection of emergency medicine and public safety, is the out-of-hospital component of the acute care health care system. The EMS mission is targeted at identifying, responding, assessing, treating, and entering suddenly ill and injured patients in the community into the health care system.

The EMS system’s viability is entirely dependent upon the capacity of its workforce of EMTs, paramedics, and 911 EMS telecommunicators to respond 24/7/365.

The devastating impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on EMS include: severe damage to workforce sustainability; grossly insufficient logistical resourcing; and further erosion of cohesive system identity.

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