Had the chance to speak on
@ctvnews about the epidemic of burnout among health care workers. It is not surprising at all that this is happening. We all want to work hard to save lives, but hopeless work in a collapsing system is what leads to burnout.
Let me try to illustrate some of the challenges we face.
Recently I arrived to my evening shift; I saw 18 ambulances outside, with patients waiting to be offloaded into a department with few free beds. Our 'Infinity Hallway' is full again with stretchers lined up as far as the eye can see. I get inside, all of our acute resuscitation beds are occupied, our ICU is full, and another ambulance crew is taking a patient to another hospital's ICU. We get an alert from EMS that a person in their 40s has collapsed, is unresponsive, and is five minutes away. Just from that description, this person likely needs a ventilator and an urgent CT scan, but we had no beds.
Immediately we try to find a spot, checking just which other really sick patient we can shuffle somewhere else. Do we move the 50 year old on high flow oxygen for Covid? Or the heart attack patient waiting for the cath lab to free up, and it goes on. The strain of constantly weighing these lives, trying to eke out space from nothing, weighs heavily on all of us.
One exhausted nurse, who helped intubated 5 patients earlier in the day muttered under their breath that they're going to quit after this. I hope she's not serious, she's one of our best. We somehow manage to find space, the crew doing the patient transfer came early, and we used that bed. But what if 2-3 more came at the same time?
Most busy ERs looks like pandemonium to an outsider, but there's method to the madness that usually can process a huge number and variety of patients, treat them and occasionally accomplish miracles. But all of this is impossible if you completely burn out the highly trained staff on the ground.