Hospitals and Healthcare

Hospitals are struggling to hold on to nurses and other professionals, staff are traumatized and the influx of patients feels like it's coming out of a fire hose, doctors say.

The Covid-19 pandemic, entering its third year with 800,000 people dead in the US alone, could damage the health industry for years to come, they predict.

"It feels like you are drinking from a fire hose with no way to control that flow," Dr. John Hick, an emergency physician at Hennepin Healthcare in Minnesota, told reporters Tuesday.

"I have been practicing for 25 years in the emergency department and every shift I am working these days is like the worst shift in my career."

A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association revealed that patients were about 20 percent less likely to assume that a woman wearing scrubs was a surgeon, compared with men. The study also found that patients consider a woman in scrubs to be “less professional” than a man in the same outfit. Because many hospitals, including mine, required workers to wear scrubs and PPE during the pandemic, this became an even bigger problem than usual for female physicians.

The first way to fight a new virus would once have been opening the windows.