Help the Helpers! Care for Healthcare Workers Now!

I fear our limited capacity to care for each other during COVID-19. It’s not beds or equipment, rather a limit of caring people with expertise. All sorts of expertise. It’s a finite pool that we need to invest in and support for the long term — two weeks, a month, a year. I know many burning out expert healthcare workers ready to throw in the towel. Learn about Project COPE.

Proem

Lately, I worry about the health and wellness of lab technicians. According to the NIH (National Institute of Health) managing COVID-19 depends on nationwide easy-to-use accurate testing. This especially means testing of populations working in high-risk occupations, teachers and students, and nursing home residents and workers. But until we have widespread, reliable home testing, the more we improve access to testing the more we rely on the limited number of burning out lab technicians. So, when my old crony, Mark Heyward Johnson, reached out to me to tell me about Project COPE (Chronicling healthcare prOviders’ Pandemic Experiences), I said, ‘tell me more.’ He described a study of the moral stress and burnout of healthcare workers during this COVID-19 era. As a person involved with PCORI (the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute) I’m familiar with the HERO registry (Healthcare Worker Exposure and Response). This research initiative seeks to…