DENVER: For many health workers, the tensions of the last year don’t seem to go away any time soon.
“We saw very bad things over the past year,” said Dr. Comilla Sasson, an emergency medicine doctor at Kaiser Permanente.
According to a report by the National Academy of Medicine, even before COVID-19, more than 50% of doctors treating patients reported that they had experienced exhaustion. Dr. Comila Sasson says a lot that stress comes from the unknown of what depends on the future.
“We have this kind of similar post-traumatic stress disorder, before things were bad and we don’t want them to go back, and I think that’s what we deal with the most, at least I personally, it’s what I deal with,” Dr. Sasson said.
As Colorado hospital capacity increases with more delta variant cases, mostly in people who are not vaccinated, many doctors feel trapped in a cycle.
“I think there’s a certain level of frustration, probably because this could have been avoided, and I think it’s something a lot of people are trying right now,” Dr. Sasson said.
This causes many to suffer from exhaustion.
“We’ve seen more stress in the workplace and we’ve seen the inability to manage it at the same time,” said Zack Bodenweber, a social worker with a History of Medical Social Work.
Bodenweber says there are three main symptoms of exhaustion: feelings of exhaustion and energy exhaustion, increased mental distance from the workplace, and reduced professional effectiveness.
“The worst thing is that people leave their jobs physically but not mentally, and now they’re at home or playing backstage from what happened,” Bodenweber said.
Bodenweber says stress management can help with exhaustion.
“Not everyone can take a long break and escape for a while, that’s how you can really take advantage. [a couple of minutes] time to calm the sympathetic nervous system? said Bodenweber.
He said the most important thing is to create an environment where health workers can share how they feel.
“I want people to know that burnout is not a personal weakness, and that it’s a really unfortunate stigma that happens and prevents people from talking about it if they think it’s a weakness,” Bodenweber said.
Without any sign of a slowdown in COVID-19 hospitalizations, stress management could keep this staff healthy and able to do their job.
“I think in the end, a lot of us still have to think that what we do is important,” Dr. Sasson said.