Exhaustion, stress, and heartache: Helping healthcare workers overcome COVID-19 physician burnout
When healthcare workers are asked why they chose their profession, most, if not all, cite the enormous satisfaction they derive from helping people heal or saving lives. Life, death, and the stress that comes from helping patients navigate between the two have been part of their workday lives from the time they were medical students.
But COVID-19 has upended their expectations of what they can achieve, how they should work, let alone what they should expect to endure in a typical day. In every country, in every healthcare facility near a COVID-19 hotspot, healthcare workers are experiencing exponentially higher levels of stress and working hours, and doing so in conditions that are not only personally dangerous, but with the added heartache of seeing so many of their patients die alone, away from the succor and support of loved ones.