The burnout doctors and nurses and other medical professionals are experiencing from COVID is horrific and I seriously hope it leads to a wholesale revamping of the medical profession and specifically hospital work.
I don’t think there was any way to fully prevent severe trauma and burnout from a mass death event like COVID, but the way hospitals are set up to run sure didn’t help matters!!!
Hospital work — and specifically working the emergency department, which I’m most familiar with — is grueling. The hours are long and you’re exposed to completely brutal stuff over and over again. And in poorer hospitals, that’s compounded by lack of resources.
Even before COVID, one of the hospitals I volunteer at in a low income area of Brooklyn routinely had stretchers packing the hallways of the ED, because there weren’t enough rooms for all the patients. Witnessing that systemic failure wears on you.
Anyway people are always shocked when they hear about doctors being cruel or callous towards patients (even when it’s out of earshot) but like… the work environments they’re in breed that callousness. They’re set up to completely drain your reservoir of empathy.
And I’m not excusing that callous behavior, but I am saying: what if we set up the medical establishment to *encourage* empathy and prevent burnout? What if we stopped having ED doctors work crazy long hours? What if medical school were free so more people could become doctors?
What if all hospitals were well funded and staffed, and everyone had good health insurance so more people could tackle their health issues *before* they became emergencies?
A broken system breeds bad ends and our medical system is broken from stem to stern.
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