After reading a slew of articles about ICU staff feeling betrayed and fed up, here is my take:
ICU staff have already suffered a long and bitterly grueling fight with Covid-19 .
The marvelously speedy availability, and effectiveness, of the vaccines offered hope of relief.
Especially in states dominated by an anti-vaccine propaganda, and usually an anti-mask/anti social-distancing one, they are facing an upsurge on Covid-19 from seemingly deliberate self-sabotage.
Many feel like Marathon runners asked to keep on running, and rightfully blame anti-science B.S.for creating a whole new upsurge, instead of allowing a blessed ‘breather’ from this pulmonary plague.
Many are closer to burnout than they may realize, and hearing their local political leaders cheerleading for the virus is an added and devastating moral injury on top of everything else.
So my advice: don’t burnout - move out.
If your state/local leaders are preaching ignorance, and bad medical practices, please protect your sanity - for yourself, and for every future patient you can help if you take care of your urgent needs.
Take a complete break if needed, but also consider working either temporarily or permanently in a community that values scientific medical advice, even if this would involve moving; there is a shortage of ICU staff both immediately, and in the near future, in every part of the USA …
The main drawback is often guilt for those patients left behind, a very real concern; but everything points to the need for some pretty extreme, and impossible to hide, catastrophe before many of these places are willing to change.
By being the finger in the dam, until you cannot stand it any longer, you may just be giving them a little more leeway to keep up their deadly anti-science charades.
Overflowing morgues refusing bodies, and maxed out ICU units refusing new patients, have been two of the hardest-to-ignore signs of the devastating cost of this disease;
other battles were often hidden, their horror subtle, their psychological costs private.
From the point of view of maintaining a healthy number of experienced ICU experts - over the medium and long run - a sanity break makes a lot of sense.
In many rural places, the lack of support both moral and financial starts at the local hospital and local political level and extends all the way up to corporate top managers and Governors.
Lack of protective equipment and lack of resources is bad enough, but lack of respect and devastating long work shifts (often with minimal extra pay ) is adding insult to injury.
If even 15% of the most overworked/underpaid ICU staff walked off to find better treatment elsewhere, this might pressure many locales to face a long-overdue reckoning.
Sadly, many institutions like schools, old age homes, and hospitals take advantage of the human desire to care and nurture and use this to underpay and disrespect their workers; workers, who are disproportionately women and often minorities, and whose compassion is systematically exploited.
The present labor-shortage is time for a long overdue shift to empowering workers in general, and hopefully particularly those in what could be called the “care” sector which is massively under-rewarded and under appreciated.