No One Is Listening to Our Health Care Workers

General Discussion
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Here's a reality check. Unfortunately, those of us who don't hide from truth and evidence, already have a sort of outline and little in this article will surprise or shock though the good news within is realistically weighted and worth catching up on.

But, the greater crisis of what we are doing to our health care workers and what that bodes for our future, is something more American’s need to become aware of. But than when half the country is firmly committed to Totalitarian Fantasy World Thinking, what good will us knowing a little more do?

 

Unless rational science and facts respecting people figure out how to start change the minds of proud belligerent know-nothings, it's only going to get worse.
 
‘No One Is Listening to Us’ More people than ever are hospitalized with COVID-19. Health-care workers can’t go on like this.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/11/third-surge-breaking-healthcare-workers/617091/

ED YONG - NOVEMBER 13, 2020 - The Atlantic

… In the months since March, many Americans have habituated to the horrors of the pandemic. They process the election’s ramifications. They plan for the holidays. But health-care workers do not have the luxury of looking away: They’re facing a third pandemic surge that is bigger and broader than the previous two. In the U.S., states now report more people in the hospital with COVID-19 than at any other point this year—and 40 percent more than just two weeks ago.

Emergency rooms are starting to fill again with COVID-19 patients. Utah, where Nathan Hatton is a pulmonary specialist at the University of Utah Hospital, is currently reporting 2,500 confirmed cases a day, roughly four times its summer peak. Hatton says that his intensive-care unit is housing twice as many patients as it normally does. His shifts usually last 12 to 24 hours, but can stretch to 36. “There are times I’ll come in in the morning, see patients, work that night, work all the next day, and then go home,” he told me. I asked him how many such shifts he has had to do. “Too many,” he said.

… In the imminent future, patients will start to die because there simply aren’t enough people to care for them. Doctors and nurses will burn out. The most precious resource the U.S. health-care system has in the struggle against COVID-19 isn’t some miracle drug. It’s the expertise of its health-care workers—and they are exhausted.

On the upside:

…Most important, COVID-19 is no longer a total mystery. Health-care workers now have a clearer idea of what the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus is capable of. Protocols that didn’t exist in the spring have become habit. “It used to be that to do a single thing, people would start email chains and you’d be 100 emails in before we knew the answer,” Choo says. “Now we’re moving faster. It feels a lot more confident.”

…But these hard-earned successes are brittle. If death rates have fallen thanks to increasing medical savvy, they might rise again as nurses and doctors burn out. “If we can get patients into staffed beds, I feel like they’re doing better,” Perencevich said. “But that requires a functional health-care system, and we’re at the point where we aren’t going to have that.”

and on and on it goes.

… For many health-care workers, the toll of the pandemic goes beyond physical exhaustion. COVID-19 has eaten away at the emotional core of their work. “To be a nurse, you really have to care about people,” Neville said. But when an ICU is packed with COVID-19 patients, most of whom are likely to die, “to protect yourself, you just shut down. You get to the point when you realize that you’ve become a machine. There’s only so many bags you can zip.”

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No one is a big word, @citizenschallenge3v I get so ticked off when I see fellow employees wearing their masks as snot catchers and chin diapers, but I can’t say anything for fear of being fired for it, especially if it’s the boss who’s doing it and she just got back from 2 weeks of being off due to having COVID. She’s still coughing up hairballs and I stay as far away from her as I can. I refuse to get near her. Then the clinic in the building is closed due to staff having COVID… AND the nurse practitioner wore her mask properly, but it was just one of those paper masks, medical grade I assume, though. Then a co-worker says, “It’s spreading around here like wildfire. You’re going to get it no matter what.” No, I’m not, if I can help it. I don’t want it, but short of quitting my job and going with no money to help my husband to pay bills… I’m to the point I really loathe humans.

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I agree with mriana that ‘no one’ is an exaggeration, but there are absolutely too many people, especially those with power, who don’t care about health care workers or what they have to say.

The care home where my wife works was recently bought by another company that owns many care homes across Canada. Do you think the new company has the money to invest in more care homes if they aren’t making a profit off of keeping people alive?

Why are Health Care Aids, Licensed Practical Nurses, cleaning staff, kitchen staff, and all the other hard workers who keep us alive when we need it most, getting minimum wages at part-time hours? Why are there levels of care that are determined purely by how much you and/or your family can pay? Why aren’t all those people being given the respect they deserve, especially in these times of Covid where they are all under far more stress and scrutiny than ever before?

Sadly I also agree with mriana about loathing humans. Not all, or even most, but a heck of a lot.

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The Editor wrote that. I try to catch myself, though I know to do as much.

Half the electorate voted for trump and the other half were impotent to do anything to educate them.

We have been living off the Hollywood Tit too long, delusional thinking has been embraced across the board. Right wing delusionals have replaced god with their Self-serving Ego’s - on the other side educated idiots like the Hoffmans and Pinkerts and their masses of Over Educated Bellybutton Gazers who have replaced learning about physical reality, with having a love affairs with their own extraordinary minds.

Playing within their mindscape - people who think showing off their personal intelligence is more important than understanding and then learning to appreciate Earth and her Evolution. Which is where we’ve always found way more accurate answers than what our own imaginings can cobble together.

 

For all their super-doper thinking abilities - too bad most modern thinkers never seem to think about the importance of recognizing the difference between their thoughts (mind) and the physical reality we are embedded within.

 

Oh but I digress, sorry.

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I don’t know how much impact Hoffman and his ilk have on the world. Very few people think about that stuff, and out of that group, lots disagree with Hoffman. So you’re talking about a small segment of a teeny tiny group. Naval gazers might have interesting ideas but they don’t have a big impact on society.

If you did a survey of regular people (say, in shopping malls, restaurants, gas stations, sports arenas, etc.,) I’d be shocked if more than 0.1% of those polled thought of ‘the nature of reality’ more than once a year.

You’re hyper aware of and sensitive to this topic because you care and are interested in it. Most aren’t… at all.

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I don’t know how much impact Hoffman and his ilk have on the world.
It's the love affair with the contrarian notion simply for the sake of being provocative - that I'm wrestling with.

To me it’s a perfect reflection of decades worth of calculated climate science denial that has done a masterful job of taking over the entire framework of the discuss and shifting into the ludicrous world of splitting hairs about fine details that add up to chump change, while ignoring the big picture that’s guaranteed to shake our society down to it’s foundation and then bury it.

Not to mention the delusional thinking that’s been demanded of the jesus freak crowd (to use my oh so 70’s phraseology).

The total disconnect from the simple realities and revelations that our own planet Earth hold, in favor of elevating one’s ego to god status.

 

But, what to do when ~90% of the people have no connection to the natural world that created us?

And the inability of the powers that be to create a more rational framework for the discussion.

Unfortunately, we’re going into a period of increasing crisis,

not the best ground for fixing things.

 

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I caught a couple nurses getting interviewed this morning on NPR. One had quit because she would help someone live, then argue with them because they didn’t think Covid was a real thing. Worse, on her way home, she would pass by packed bars with people not wearing masks.

You’re hyper aware of and sensitive to this topic because you care and are interested in it. Most aren’t… at all. -- 3.14rat
I think if you asked it like a poll, you would get that 0.1%. But let's not forget why CFI exists. They inquire in to theories about ghosts, UFOs, and the existence of gods and goddesses. This work began a few hundred years ago and has made some progress, but still has a long way to go. To keep itself it alive, religion has volunteered as a surrogate for the big questions. Even for the "god is love" crowd.

Before that, you believed or you left the tribe, later you risked getting burned at the stake, or the more mundane loss of support of your family. Once all that got under the control of secular governments, church became the hour or two people could still find hope in magic and higher powers. They delegated the big questions to that. They just choose a building with a social group that matches their needs and then say, “these people have the answers”. So, you’re right, in the sense that they don’t think about it.

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The issue is with our brains and how they [don’t] work.

The groups you (and most on here) hate are the ones who choose to believe things based on what they want to be true rather than facts and logic. Hoffman and climate deniers are both symptoms of the same condition.

Until brains can have their inherent problems fixed, there will always be people who can’t stop themselves from believing things for bad reasons. Education and raising empathetic and compassionate kids will go a long ways towards mitigating the inherent problems in the human brain, but they require effort and money, and even when maximized, will never come close to stopping a large percentage from still believing things for bad reasons.

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The groups you hate are the ones who choose to believe things based on what they want to be true rather than facts and logic.
One of the more interesting data points to come out of Jonathan Haidt's work on how the brain works is, liberals are spectacularly bad at stating what conservatives think. Conservatives miss the mark sometimes too, but not as bad as liberals. So, when a liberal says, "conservative be like ____ ", I always take it with a grain or two of salt.
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But it’s not about “conservative” it’s about people who take it as a point of pride to disregard rational scientific facts. People who are okay with slander and intimidation instead of reason, learning, compromise.

People who believe the truth doesn’t matter, and that afflicts both side though the right much worse.

 

Calling the Republican party of today as totalitarian is nothing but descriptive. And most of it is because they belligerently reject true facts, based on short term self interest.

Excuse me for using this as my venting room.

 

 

 

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The U.S., at least, has a long history of wishful thinking, going back to the European immigrants who founded this country and expected to either get rich quick in a place they’d never been to and were abysmally ignorant of, or to establish a Christian utopia to prepare for the soon-to-be rapture.

From there, we’ve had hundreds of years of valuing our own reality above all else, even reality according to experts who’s job is to seek the highest truth within a field. This approach (and “respect” for it) accelerated greatly in the 20th Century for various reasons, I think.

I have patients who work in ICUs and infectious disease wards who are subject daily to the terrible human consequences of such an approach to the reality of a disease epidemic. If anti-expert, anti-science, ‘I’ll believe the reality that I find most pleasing to imagine’ thinking is causing very real suffering and death and those subscribing to it STILL remain solopsistic, that’s a problem so substantial that I can’t immediately imagine a solution.

My $.02.

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John: "My $.02."
That agrees with my two cents.

So is it worth four cents now?

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Here we go with the “reality” pushing via math. Not in this country, buster. :wink:

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Anyone familiar with EVV ? (Electronic Visit Verifcation)

800,000 CNA s engaged in home-health care services nationwide will be required to buy I-pads so that the state and feds can track their movements by GPS when implementing the patients POC (plan of care).

Is an Orwellian “Medical Big Brother” here?

IOW, CNA’s are now required to do a lot of administrative work, which is practically very difficult with hands-on care in the field, especially with in-home elderly and special needs clients.

This may sound like an improvement, but I doubt that it can be implemented without some major problems.

Health care patients are not warehouse inventory goods like cans of beans, that can be tracked electronically and treated with rigid scheduling. Especially elderly clients need flexibility to account for their special needs, which cannot be anticipated and must be attended to immediately.

This has been in the works since 2016 but I suspect it is a lot more complicated than what the adminstrative heads anticipated.