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Canadian health-care workers are exhausted and feel hopeless, groups say

"The burden of COVID has been placed on the shoulders of the health-care workforce for far too long."

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Groups representing health-care workers across the country say members are at their wits’ end, even in provinces like Quebec where the fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic has been less rampant compared with places like Alberta and Saskatchewan.

More than 30 groups representing front-line workers from coast to coast held an emergency COVID-19 summit Tuesday evening to address urgent needs across the network as the country enters its 20th month of the pandemic. The general consensus among them is that workers are exhausted and do not feel heard or supported, and that for some, the only realistic solution seems to be to leave the profession altogether.

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“Our front-line workers are no longer on the brink of exhaustion — they are exhausted,” said Katharine Smart, the president of the Canadian Medical Association, during a virtual news conference Wednesday. “And given that they are not currently getting the support they need, they are also not seeing any hope or light at the end of this very long tunnel. This is clearly unacceptable, pure and simple. The burden of COVID has been placed on the shoulders of the health-care workforce for far too long.”

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The groups are asking for governments to address the dire situation in COVID-19 red zones immediately and to implement short-term ways to help health-care workers, such as by making more mental health resources available to them. But the groups — who say pandemic responses appear to be a political hot potato between levels of government — are also calling on governments to begin planning for the long-term by finding ways to retain current staff and then to recruit more.

“We have a lot of work ahead of us,” Smart said. “Once the pandemic is part of history, we will have a legacy of workforce issues; problems that we have all known existed long before COVID and now are much more serious.”

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The exhaustion among health-care workers has been felt in Quebec, according to emergency physician and CMA Quebec board member Dr. Abdo Shabah, who said he has many colleagues who’ve needed to take time off “because they were unable to handle the pressure they were going through.”

“The health-care system right now, in Quebec, is extremely, extremely vulnerable,” Shabah said. “If we have any increase in cases, I think if the system has enough beds, it won’t have enough human resources. And without professionals, there is no health-care system.”

Shabah said that while the situation is relatively stable in Quebec, public health measures have been and continue to be imperative and should be reinforced in some areas, such as by increasing the use of rapid tests and vaccination mandates.

“It takes courage to take those decisions, and in some countries they have taken those decisions,” Shabah said. “I think everybody should be vaccinated right now to be able to get back to almost normal life.”

The groups acknowledged the imminent issues that will arise from Quebec’s vaccine mandate for health-care workers, but stressed its importance nonetheless.

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“We need to recognize these vaccine mandates are necessary to keep the system functional in terms of safety of the professionals working in it and most importantly, our patients who deserve to have safe health care,” Smart said.

To Smart, the need to hold an emergency COVID-19 summit was “devastating.” One of its main themes, she said, was hopelessness.

“I want to be clear the level of burnout among health-care workers is at a level no one has ever seen before,” Smart said. “There is a pervasive sense of hopelessness driven by a broken system, not by a lack of individual resiliency. Health-care workers do not feel heard or respected, they work in a system that has been ignored, and the responsibility to solve this crisis has been off-loaded to them.”

kthomas@postmedia.com

twitter.com/katelynthomas

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