By Samantha Wilson
Over the course of the past almost three years, COVID-19 has wreaked havoc on everybody’s lives in nearly every way imaginable. COVID-19 started slowly creeping its way through the population until its infectivity got the better of all of us, and caused everything we took for granted to shut down in 2020, and only now are things beginning to go back to a new form of “normal”.
According to the CDC, it is widely accepted that the Sars-CoV2 virus made its animal-to-human jump around December 31, 2019, in a meat market in the Chinese city of Wuhan, when its first positive case was confirmed. In the early days of COVID, China continued to downplay the virus in the crucial initial days until it was too late, by that time spreading to the Philippines, then Italy, and inevitably the United States soon after. Our globalized economies around the world which are dependant on unhindered travel, plummeted, and everything we once knew changed entirely for everyone. Healthcare workers were on the front lines of this new and unexpected disaster for years, and they faced some of the most difficult and unimaginable battles both physically and mentally when dealing with ramifications of COVID-19.
According to the Journal of General Internal Medicine, for healthcare workers “This mental health burden is compounding health care labor shortages and threatening quality of care. Half of the participants in the survey reported that the pandemic had reduced the likelihood of remaining in their field.”
If healthcare workers continue to leave their respective career paths then this will be detrimental to both healthcare workers and patients alike as when a hospital is short staffed this can lead to both poor quality of care for patients and even more burnout because other healthcare workers will have to work even more overtime to compensate for hospitals being short staffed.
If there aren’t changes made to work on helping hospital staff, people will continue to quit and not return to their respective field within healthcare due to burnout. By the year 2025, there is a projected 10-20 percent gap in nursing staff. There are more patients needing help than nurses available due to mass burnout and many people quitting their jobs.
Working to offer both better mental health resources for nurses and more fair wages for the jobs they day can hopefully work to allow for a brighter future for nursing.
