Podcast gives voice to traumatized health care workers on the front lines of pandemic
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Diane E. Meier, MD, FACP, FAAHPM, remembers the fanfare around “health care heroes” during the initial surges of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“At 7 o’clock every night, people would bang pots and pans out their windows,” Meier, who serves as vice chair for public policy and professor of palliative medicine at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, as well as a HemOnc Today Editorial Board member, told Healio. “There was applause and music, and then all of that just faded away.”
The public had become fatigued, she said, and their attention span for the everyday tragedies occurring within the nation’s hospitals had grown short.
“This is understandable, because the public has been traumatized, as well,” she said.
Less understandable is the overt aggression some patients directed toward frontline health care workers, often driven by political polarization around COVID-19, Meier said.
“Not only are they being taken for granted in a general way, but they’ve been dealing with downright hostility from a number of patients in certain parts of the country,” she said. “People have been spat on, they’ve been hit and they’ve been threatened. So, not only were they putting their own lives and the lives of their families at risk, but they were also being mistreated by the very people they were trying to help.”
To address the discouragement, stress and exhaustion of these health care workers, Meier and Andrew E. Esch, MD, MBA, senior education advisor at Center to Advance Palliative Care, launched a podcast titled “Breaking Point: Voices from the Front Lines of the Pandemic.”
The podcast features health care workers from across the country, who often share distressing stories of their experiences on the COVID-19 front lines. Meier said for these health care professionals, the mission of helping others is integral to self-concept, and patients who respond antagonistically to this assistance can threaten the clinicians’ sense of purpose.
“We are trained to help people who are sick,” she said. “We’re proud of that and committed to that. It’s a very powerful motivator, because it’s linked to moral values. When people are willing to hurt you and see you as the enemy, it threatens that self-concept.”
Meier said guests to her podcast often discuss the fact that this disruption to the provider/patient relationship can cause clinicians to become emotionally “checked out” as a self-protective measure.
“Several of the people speaking on our podcast have alluded to how they confronted this kind of progressive numbness,” she said.
Meier said several palliative care program leaders have spoken on the podcast about the imperative for providers to care for one another, as well as for patients.
“They want to expand the work of palliative care teams beyond the care of patients and families, and also focus on caring for our bigger family of colleagues across the whole institution,” she said. “We’ve always done that, but it’s become much more explicit and essential now.”
The “Breaking Point” podcast can be accessed at www.capc.org/podcasts/breaking-point/?fbclid=IwAR2nnF39nIGwBKikKY4Hr17FJp4old_gES9dbuRNxFcd2nzSssWyOd5rdC8.
For more information:
Diane E. Meier, MD, FACP, FAAHPM, can be reached at diane.meier@mssm.edu.
Collapse
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts