Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/p4kcwi/we_cannot_stretch_anymore_hospital_leaders_on/
It's interesting to see r/medicine and some of the other medical subreddits start to radicalise against antivaxxers. Moral injury and secondary-exposure PTSD are already huge killers in the field. The normal moral context behind normal cases in an ER or ICU really does a number on staff, and now they've got a very strong ethical dilemma. Their sickest patients are either lemming terrorists who were fine with murdering everyone to disprove germ theory or they're the victims of those terrorists. While dying of a virus they don't believe in, those terrorists will still push their bullshit and expect sympathy from someone who has spent a year in a plague warzone watching people die.
The professional subreddits are slowly but surely beginning to turn hard against COVID deniers. Mods ban them if they post, commenters are more vocal about the situation and now understand "do no harm" with moral nuance similar to a medic's "do no harm, do know harm". As further variants and waves batter a wounded field full of wounded people who have already began striking against their hospitals, it's going to be a fascinating time to keep an eye on the medical community
Delta is making me glad I left medicine before the pandemic. It would have already made me join Healthcare Hezbollah, but the big thing I was fearing was a demographic shift from boomers- a group I can usually socially condemn- to younger generations like the Spanish Flu. Peds cases in emergency are a whole other realm that we're not meant to deal with repeatedly. If it shifts from the hogs killing themselves to the hogs murdering their children and still denying the virus, antivaxxers should line the Via Appia as a warning to anyone entering the city. Cross after cross after cross until there aren't trees.
History is repeating itself. I was afraid this was coming when we didn’t take the first wave seriously.
I’m still doing medical work for the innocent people we save, but I’m leaving the field after the pandemic. Most of my colleagues are planning to as well.
America is going to have a severe healthcare worker shortage and it will take them a long time to rehire. I know multiple doctors already applying for visas in the EU and Canada.
I wish I didn’t agree with this.
The confluence of trends between medical education being increasingly too expensive in a worsening economy and the pandemic causing a healthcare worker exodus has been at the top of my viewing list since it began. Both inputs and outputs are being stressed in ways such a shitty and atomised system isn't able to handle. Even before the pandemic I'd read stories about rural areas with like one GP or psychiatrist covering multiple counties with massive caseloads. After this or if it worsens, which I'm guessing it will for upwards of a few years if vaccine-resistant variants proliferate, something has to give. I can't get a solid read on what's going to happen but it's one of the big contradictions of the era.
Expect even more NPs, although the costs of those programs has also increased over the last 5 years, so less people are applying. Student loan debt is causing many to stay at the RN or even CNA level.
We’ve already hired some docs who were previously rural GPs, but closed their practice and moved due to their communities not following quarantine / vaccinating. When your patients won’t listen to you, there’s not really a point in staying.
We’re preparing for at least another year.
The hate for midlevels in r/medicine is an interesting dynamic. Docs there see NPs like we see scabs. Correctly so but the increase in quickstream licenses like NP/PA/LPN will probably undermine a lot of the status and benefits of MDs/RNs. They might get the scarcity benefit that post-plague serfs did or they might be increasingly replaced by midlevels with expanded privileges. I know the NP association is pushing hard for a GP-like scope of practice. Even that LPN is a five digit investment to enter an industry where the workers are striking outside the hospital and the work will kill them faster than a trade for less pay.
Losing rural practitioners and expanding the hinterlands will be catastrophic long-term. At least a fair amount of alternative woo is sought out because they have no access to real or good medicine. Without a positive relationship to that system, which they have lots of reasons to think is trying to fuck them over, antivax conspiracies are an extension of the real and imagined conspiracies of the masonic temple they can't enter. When those same people genuinely have no access, facebook will have answers. They'll be even worse next time.
You see this in other fields, too. Beauty of the free market!