Health workers call for radical changes to health care to treat pandemic burnout

Health workers have now endured two difficult years of pandemic conditions, leading to serious burnout across nearly all sectors of the health-care system.

Canada’s ailing health systems need some drastic intervention from federal and provincial governments if there is any hope of reviving them post-pandemic, an emergency summit of nearly 40 health-worker organizations concluded at an emergency meeting Wednesday.

Health workers have now endured two difficult years of pandemic conditions, leading to serious burnout across nearly all sectors of the health-care system.

“The real shared experience across health-care workers and professionals is that the level of burnout is to a point now where it’s really starting to threaten the sustainability of the system,” said Canadian Medical Association president Dr. Katharine Smart.

The summit, hosted by the Canadian Medical Association and the Canadian Nurses Association, was struck to chart a new course for health care in the face of widespread attrition.

Personal service workers and nurses have coped with professionals leaving their jobs in droves or retiring early, while the CMA says doctors report that they plan to work fewer hours to deal with the fatigue.

As the rest of the country starts to talk about the possibility of post-pandemic recovery, health workers say for them there is no end in sight. Now that cases of COVID-19 have dropped, they still have to tackle the serious backlogs that grew while non-emergent care was put on hold during the peaks of the pandemic waves.

The CMA says that hospitals are still over capacity, even as fewer COVID-19 patients need hospital care. That’s because beds are filling up with people who couldn’t get care during the pandemic, she said.

Provincial governments have recognized the problem and called for more money from the federal government to keep pace with the rising demands on their systems.