A recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) highlights a disturbing increase in threats and verbal abuse directed at healthcare workers since the onset of the pandemic. This surge in harassment is intrinsically linked to heightened levels of anxiety, depression, and burnout among these frontline professionals.
Across the United States, healthcare workers are grappling with a burgeoning mental health crisis. The CDC’s latest survey reveals a worsening scenario of burnout, anxiety, and depression experienced by healthcare workers over the past five years. NPR’s Pien Huang brings us this report.
Sarah Warren embarked on her nursing career at a Florida hospital in 2018, and it was a challenging journey right from the start.
Warren shares her experience: “Within my first six months as a nurse, I was actually choked with my stethoscope by a patient.”
Despite such challenges, she persisted through the throes of the pandemic, enduring mandatory overtime and the physical strain of handling patients three times her size. Over the subsequent three years, this relentless dedication led to severe burnout and injury. Warren recollects, “I got to a point at the end of 2021 where I just didn’t recognize myself anymore. I had given everything, emotionally and mentally, to this role.”
Warren’s ordeal with extreme stress and burnout is far from unique.
Dr. Casey Chosewood, director of the CDC’s Office for Worker Health, asserts, “To label our current and long-standing challenge a crisis is an understatement.”
Chosewood is a co-author of a recent CDC survey that reveals the extent to which the mental health crisis has intensified during the pandemic. Shockingly, almost half of the surveyed healthcare workers reported experiencing burnout last year.
Dr. Deborah Houry, the CDC’s chief medical officer, underscores that workplace harassment has also surged during this time.
She explains, “In the healthcare setting, it could be threats of violence from patients, family members upset about a long wait – just as frustrations – but it increased. It nearly doubled during this time.”
This increase in harassment is intrinsically linked to higher levels of anxiety, depression, and burnout among healthcare workers. Almost half of them indicated that they were likely to seek new employment. In response, the CDC is urging healthcare systems to take immediate measures to combat worker burnout, emphasizing the need to build trust with employees and bolster supervisor support.
Sarah Warren, the nurse from Florida who has experienced these challenges firsthand, believes that the field requires new laws and standards. Having left her nursing job in 2022, she yearns for the opportunity to care for her patients once again.
Warren remarks, “What I would give to be able to just care for my patients – but I can’t do that. And so many other healthcare workers are in that same position. The system has placed us there.” She has since founded a nonprofit organization aimed at advocating for better conditions and mental health support for healthcare workers.
