What Happens If Health-Care Workers Stop Showing Up? – The Atlantic

If someone is going to risk their life, then they deserve the best possible care to save them. We understood this during Ebolathe first treatment center built by the U.S. government in Liberia was the Monrovia Medical Unit, specifically for Ebola-infected health-care staff. Providers need the reassurance that they will get preferential access to care and medications in exchange for their sacrifice. This is not just fair, but practicalkeeping clinicians alive means that they will be able to continue to provide care. Just knowing that the MMU was opening made recruiting providers easier.

Providers who become infected also deserve fair compensationfull pay while they are sick or if they are forced to quarantine to protect their patients. They should all have disability and life insurance. The families of those who sacrifice their life deserve great compensation.

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I have seen little evidence of this. Emergency-physician message boards are full of concern about the lack of preparation by their hospitals. Few of these financial arrangements exist. I havent received any special training, mostly just a few emails about the situation. That doesnt protect me. PPE is already being rationed, and there are dire predictions that it will run out long before this pandemic is over. Should I still have to go to work knowing I will get infected and have a 5 percent chance of dying? Why do my colleagues have to pay for a separate apartment when forced to self-quarantine away from their families?

Thus far, the attitude has been: Whats the big deal? Its just COVID-19, with a mortality of less than 1 percent. But tell that to the two emergency physicians in critical care right now, or the infected health-care providers in Arkansas, Washington, New York, and other states. Tell that to their families.

Six months into the 15-month Ebola epidemic, health-care providers stopped coming to work. They had little PPE. They saw their friends die without any special care. Their colleagues began abandoning their jobs, one by one, until there was no one left. There was nowhere for people to obtain treatment for stomach pain, childbirth, heart attacks, car crashes, or any other routine or unpredictable health event. As a result, experts estimate that more people died from illnesses like malaria and diarrhea than Ebola.

When health-care providers get sick, become disabled, or die, they can no longer provide care for anyone, not just infected patients.

In Italy, at least 2,000 health-care workers have been infected and are not providing care. Some have died. Some hospitals cohort, or group, providers so that they care for only infected patients, leaving others to care for the uninfected. Others providers cant work, because they are quarantined after possible exposures or because of known infections. But that is the way it has to be. The core ethics principle for physicians and nurses is primum non nocereFirst, do no harmand the last thing we want to do is spread the infection to our patients or other health-care staff.

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What Happens If Health-Care Workers Stop Showing Up? - The Atlantic

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