By Connie M. Ulrich, The Boston Globe, April 6, 2020
It is heartbreaking to hear about the emotional turmoil of health care clinicians who are fighting on behalf of COVID-19 patients. They are using their voices to tell us their raw and embattled stories of front-line challenges: being alone with dying patients, trying to use Facebook or other social media to allow family members to say their last goodbyes, crying out of frustration and desperation due to a lack of personal protective equipment, and expressing a fearful mistrust of the systems that are not protecting them and may even fire them for speaking out.
What we can also hear in their stories are the many ways that health care systems and governments have failed them. Hospital administrators and others must begin now to think about the short- and long-term mental health implications for this morally courageous group of nurses, physicians, and other front-line workers.
All of us in clinical practice have had to face the loss of patients, no matter what we tried to do to save them. Many of us remember those deaths down to the details, for the impressions they have made on our psyche. I remember a parent holding her child after he died and telling me that she had prayed that God would take him that night to end any suffering. Indeed, the child died that night. The sorrow and grief after a patient dies are experienced differently by each team member involved in a patient’s care.
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