'We're Destroying The Very Things- And People- Keeping Us Safe'

[appalachiablue]

- 'We're destroying the very things—and people—keeping us safe.' Daily Kos, Jan. 29, 2021.

Old growth forests are one of the most important parts of the Earth's ecosystem. These trees last for generations, even millennia (or longer!), and provide protection to hundreds of thousands of species of plants and animals, and do the very work to keep the planet alive and habitable for the human race. The trees that make up forests are highly sought after. They're incredibly durable. and useful in so many different functions. Unfortunately, every tree cut down is a tree gone forever, leaving a hole that cannot be replaced, even by replanted trees. The indiscriminate felling of these trees is not just folly, it's potentially suicidal, leading to an acceleration of climate change that could make human life on the surface of the planet completely untenable.

I think about those forests a lot when I think about what's going on amongst healthcare providers in the United States of America. As an ER nurse, I've written about the effect the COVID-19 crisis has had on emergency and acute services providers on more than one occasion, but I think it's clear there are a lot of people who don't appreciate the magnitude of the apocalypse on the horizon. First, I need to reiterate an important point: This isn't a new problem.

Our healthcare system, over the past couple decades, has seen its ability to function systematically undermined. We have sacrificed an enormous amount of capacity and redundancy in the name of cost efficiency and profit.

Doctors, nurses, technicians—“human resources”—are expensive, and the first impetus of Wall Street is always, always the same: Cut hours and increase productivity, damn the consequences.

Efficiency is fine, but it only works in a predictable environment. If we know for sure that we'll get exactly 100 patients a day, and we know approximately how sick each patient will be, and that no staff will call out sick, an efficient environment works. It’s obvious how quickly relying on those metrics can devolve. But, beyond that, basing acute medical care on efficiency metrics requires you to utilize providers that are incredibly talented; they’re smart, well trained, proactive, hardworking. Those people are hard to come by, though, taking years to train appropriately—training that relies on a cadre of experienced professionals to mentor them along the way. Without that core group, our country would have already been sunk.

The 10-year RN Work Project study found 17% of newly licensed RNs leave their first nursing job within the first year, 33% leave within two years, and 60% leave within eight years; those rates are an average across all nursing professions.

The same study found that it is not uncommon for ICU and ER turnover rates to be as high as 90% over a 10-year period. It's that remaining 10% of staff that holds the entire system together. They’re the old growth forests of the healthcare world. They're the ones who keep all the holes in the community social net stitched together. And they do it quietly, out of sight and out of mind, keeping the system stable.. Now, with COVID-19, we have only supercharged this problem. We have a group of dedicated professionals who have been wrecking themselves to keep our country running—to keep our healthcare system from collapsing. We have politicians and leaders in every state and from every party who are content to give those same people a pat on the back and laud them as "heroes," while counting on them to take the fire so they don't have to take political fire themselves.

.. That attitude- which affects far more people than just those of us on the frontline- is going to result in a wholesale evisceration of the very group of providers that are keeping things from going off the rails.

They will hang on until we, as a country, get to the other side of the pandemic...and then they will leave the healthcare field forever, creating reverberations and cascading consequences that will take generations to resolve, if ever...

Read More,
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/1/29/2011453/-We-re-destroying-the-very-things-and-people-keeping-us-safe