COVID 19 and Healthcare Worker Burnout

Article Review: COVID-19 and the Mental Health Impact Upon Healthcare Workers

Americans lauded healthcare workers as the nation’s heroes during the height of the pandemic. But, just like other Americans, healthcare workers too were also personally and intimately affected by the impact of COVID-19. They had to deal with the overwhelming experience of dealing with stress, sickness, and death daily, in a manner which many of them were unprepared for before the crisis. Hall & Powers (2022) remind the reader in their article “Addressing the mental health impact of the COVID pandemic on healthcare workers,” America is now facing three years of the pandemic, and years of medical misinformation, death, and frustrations with the seemingly endless waves of infection and reinfection.

Healthcare workers face greater physical risk from infectious illness, and also a psychological toll from frustration and a sense of helplessness, both when patients pass away, and also resistance to accepting vaccination and the medical facts of what is known about COVID-19. At the beginning of the pandemic, workers suffered from a chronic lack of personal protective equipment (PPE), adequate ways of treating the illness, and still are critically overburdened with the responsibilities of providing care. Even before COVID-19 was a factor, burnout rates were extremely high in the medical profession, and the authors report that the National Academy of Medicine considered burnout a crisis, with 35-54% of nurses and physicians exhibiting symptoms (Hall & Powers, 2022).

Since the pandemic began, burnout has increased, and healthcare workers are leaving a profession already experiencing shortages of personnel. Stress and anxiety intensify such symptoms, and a shocking 15% of surveyed physicians reported contemplating taking their own lives because of professional stresses (Hall & Powers, 2022). Depression and anxiety are clinically measurable phenomena, and the statistics suggest that healthcare workers are more vulnerable to these psychological conditions. Members of the caring profession often need to learn to care for themselves. The pandemic and feelings of helplessness in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds also created a sense of moral and spiritual burnout and distress for not doing enough to help patients (Hall & Powers, 2022). The article also notes Internet misinformation blaming healthcare workers for supporting vaccination intensified the sense of helplessness workers face after so many long months of treating critically ill patients (Hall & Powers, 2022).

Burnout is a national health crisis. It is a crisis because some of the nation’s most valuable workers are leaving a necessary profession and a crisis because the healthcare profession has a responsibility to ensure the mental and physical health of its employees. Healthcare workers should not be required to sacrifice their mental and physical health, despite all the talk about their heroic work in the media. Burned out workers are more apt to make errors, and staffing shortages in the profession further contribute to the cycle of mental stress and burnout. Burnout hurts patients and healthcare workers alike. It also discourages new employees from entering the profession.