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TORONTO – Director of a Toronto heart center calls for urgent help for all those doctors, nurses and other health workers who are at their wit’s end, calling their burnout another “public health crisis” .
Dr Barry Rubin, president and medical director of the Peter Munk Heart Center at the University Health Network (UHN), says surveys conducted at a cardiovascular center even before the pandemic revealed that 78% of nurses, 65% of doctors and 73 % of other healthcare workers evoked signs of burnout.
But for the chief psychiatrist at Toronto UHN Health Network, there is no doubt that the pandemic has exacerbated these feelings of fatigue, stress and depression among many health care workers. “COVID has really exacerbated a problem that already existed,” said Dr. Susan Abbey, commenting on the survey results published Tuesday in the Journal of the Canadian Medical Association. “Almost everyone struggles on the front lines.”
The UHN study interviewed 414 doctors, nurses and auxiliary staff, including physiotherapists, respiratory and occupational therapists, social workers and speech language pathologists, between November 2018 and January 2019 – so more than a year before the pandemic.
Burnout can include job dissatisfaction, staff turnover, reduced quality of life and suicidal thoughts. And these feelings also affect care, recalls Dr. Rubin.
In itself a public health crisis
“Burnout is associated with an increased incidence of medical errors, serious safety incidents, hospital readmission, poorer patient outcomes, and in some cases even increased workload. patient mortality, ”he said Tuesday in a statement. “The burnout of clinical physicians is a public health crisis that we must address now.”
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The calls come as new data suggests Ontario’s health care system will be overwhelmed unless a winter outbreak of infections is brought under control quickly.
New provincial modeling, released on Tuesday, suggests there could be around 500 patients with COVID-19 in intensive care by mid-January, as the number of available beds declines. It is also predicted that deaths could double, to 100 per day, by the end of February, under current restrictions against COVID-19. The Ontario government announced tougher measures on Tuesday.
However, these increases in cases will necessarily put additional pressure on healthcare workers in the weeks to come, officials have warned.
Doctor Dominique Désy, of the Association of General Practitioners of Yamaska, called on the population to adhere to public health instructions, while acknowledging that many citizens are psychologically exhausted by constant calls for vigilance. “They are fed up, and it’s been too long, and they want to live their life as they see fit (…) I understand that, we understand that”, she admitted.
“But the blind spot of this pandemic is going to be at the end (when hospitals may have to) choose who stays on the ventilator or not. And nobody wants to come to this. “
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