Zen

A very small percentage of healthcare workers have declared they will quit or be fired over vaccine mandates. I know numbers in the hundreds seem like a lot. It isn’t. This isn’t cataclysmic. It is unfortunate. The large majority of us welcome vaccines and if we need to booster every six months so be it. Covid is nothing to sneeze at.

The main forces driving the shortage of health care workers, and nurses in particular, have been brewing for decades. Nurses were overworked and underpaid ever since I’ve been in the profession. Hospitals have played the dance forever. Profits before patients. Beautiful lobbies, minimal staffing, increasing patient acuity and toxic culture are as much a part of nursing as “health care heroes” haven’t been. As a nurse I have been peed on, spit on, hit, strangled, had both semen and poop smeared on me, threatened with violence and screamed at by just about everyone including doctors and the patients themselves. This was long before our current crisis. This is just nursing. Nursing isn’t glamorous. It never has been. It is a hard often thankless job. Most of us go into the profession with the misguided intention to help others while making a livable wage. The wage is livable-just. Helping others is less tangible. We are not seen a whole lot differently than society sees our educators, or our trash collectors.

Hospitals, nursing homes, home health and hospice agencies haven’t stopped being profit driven just because there is an ongoing pandemic. They still expect burned out ,over worked, under paid staff to spin gold out of straw. Work harder, longer, with less and less. Don’t expect respect, only condemnation. Add a populous that violently denies common sense and basic scientific fact. Add a covid surge that never should have happened. Add those of us that have had our own personal tragedies and our own illnesses . That sums up our current reality. If you think of healthcare as a marriage, nurses are the abused and battered spouse.

Services are not being triaged in Hospitals because a few hundred health care workers (this number includes housekeeping, maintenance, the cafeteria staff in case your weren’t aware) are refusing to have any sense. Hospitals were short staffed before all this started. You cannot expect employees to run on fumes indefinitely . Eventually enough is enough.

Health care corporations have consistently valued profits over the lives. Unfortunately the end result is to run out of lives.

I think this sums up administrative support. In the midst of pre-vaccine covid I was admitting a hospice patient in a large hospital’s ICU. In order to support (?) their highly stressed staff, administration had repurposed a small conference room into -I kid you not- a zen garden complete with a tiny little sand box and miniature rake.

The door was kept locked.

I think that sums up American healthcare in a nut shell.