‘Hero’: I’m Officially Over It

Editor’s Note: This is the 15th installment of “Our Stories,” a WOW Dems series that tells personal stories related to the critical issues of our time, such as the COVID-19 crisis. This post was written by WOW Dems Communications and Legislative Committees member Kim Koenig, BSN, RN, CCRN.

I’m an ICU nurse, and I’m officially over nurses being called heroes.

Calling nurses heroes is a framework that’s been built by well-intentioned people who want to help nurses but can’t, or far worse, and far more commonly, ill-intentioned people who can help nurses, but won’t.

Calling nurses heroes is a distraction from the inexplicable roadblocks that have been laid out again and again before and throughout this pandemic, making safe, adequate care virtually impossible, and all but ensuring that the pandemic be allowed to devastate our hospitals and our communities.

We knew, for example, as early as April that the Trump administration was intentionally forcing states to compete for personal protective equipment (PPE) in the midst of a total global shutdown of the supply chain. The rationale for such a painfully obtuse approach to a national crisis is perplexing, but the cost? As of September 2020, more than 1,700 frontline healthcare workers had died from Covid-19.

Seventeen-hundred people who signed up to save lives, not forfeit their own, are gone. And this of course is a drop in the bucket compared to the loss of over 250,000 American lives to this horrid virus.

Bedside Burnout

Let’s be clear about this: Nurses aren’t heroes. Nurses are simply people doing an incredibly important, incredibly difficult job. And they want to do that job, and they want to do it well. But it was never supposed to be a job done at their peril.

Now, as our country faces a second, far more deadly wave, nurses are leaving the bedside in droves. It should come as no surprise that we’ve actually been here before. A 2019 report found that 14.4 percent of nurses reported being “unengaged” with their work, and 41 percent reported feelings of burnout, a phenomenon associated with unaddressed and unmanaged exhaustion, frustration, demotivation, and ultimately a reduction in work efficacy. The net result of this burnout epidemic has been a sharp rise in suicide rates among nurses, who are at significantly higher risk than the general population.

A Predictable Tragedy

This complex cross-section of physical and psychological barriers are the tragic side effects of an overly taxed healthcare system that asks its workers to do far more than they are capable of with far less resources than is justifiable in the wealthiest country in the world. And in the chaos of a pandemic, it’s easy to lose sight of that. It’s so much easier to chalk this up to something unforeseen than it is to recognize that this has been an impending and predictable tragedy visible from miles away.

How is it, for example, that a country with the financial resources of the United States, whose hospitals were already overflowing with patients before the pandemic, still suffered the closure of dozens of hospitals across the country? Yet large hospital conglomerates are thriving and turning incredible profits. Are these profits equating to better health? Decidedly not. Are things better for our healthcare workers? Clearly not.

Smoke and Mirrors

If this pandemic can teach us anything about the state of healthcare in our country, it’s this: Administrative costs, which largely make up the bulk of these mega-hospital corporations’ profits, aren’t being used to improve the resources gravely needed by our nurses to simply do their jobs. They’re not being used to improve a healthcare system that has become an increasing cost burden to the average American family every year, with nothing to show for it in terms of improved health or care. But these mega-hospital corporations have been very successful in two distinct ways.

First, they pay insurance companies and their millionaire administrators incredibly well. Two, they’ve gotten the public to focus so much on nurses as heroes, that we’ve been distracted from realizing that nurses have been scapegoated – by design – as lambs to the slaughter. It’s a painfully cynical game of sociopolitical smoke and mirrors.

Profits Over People

We just came through what is arguably the most politically fraught and contentious presidential election in our nation’s history. But the pandemic remains, and in its wake, two years from now, will be another major election cycle in this country.

I implore you to remember this: We have two political parties. Both are imperfect. But one is trying to improve healthcare costs and access, while the other is trying to protect the millionaire administrators at the top of the healthcare food chain who sleep comfortably in their beds at night, while 1,700 healthcare workers sleep forever. This avoidable tragedy was allowed to happen thanks, in part, to a system that could afford to take better care of its workers, but didn’t, and an administration propped up by a party that would rather protect profits than people.

In the Line of Fire

The pro-life party stood by and did nothing while I, my coworkers, and by extension our families were put in the line of fire without even a bulletproof vest – or an appropriate supply of masks. Consider this the next time you hear a Republican legislator try to tell you that this is the greatest healthcare system in the world, or worse, refer to a healthcare worker as a hero.

 

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