▲ In Shanghai, covid tests continue on modules on public roads. Since last March, the city has been under lockdown.Photo Afp
From the Writing
Newspaper La Jornada
Monday, April 18, 2022, p. eleven
exhausted and brutalized
This is how British medical staff feel, in the midst of a mental health crisis that has increased due to the covid-19 pandemic and causes hospital employees to have taken more than 8 million days off due to illness in the recent five-year period, published Guardian.
Senior officials called for an urgent plan to fill human resource shortages after data revealed mental health leave had risen since 2017 to its highest levels during the pandemic.
Employees of the National Health Service of Great Britain requested more than 8 million days of rest for the aforementioned cause in the last five years, 2.2 million of them last year during the crisis by the coronavirus, according to data from 67 trusts of hospitals in Great Britain.
Parliamentarians warned that doctors and nurses were in a breaking point
and that there was no clear plan to ease the pressure. Some doctors warned that it would be the consequence of dealing with the pandemic.
In addition, Britain’s health system has 110,000 permanent vacancies, with no solid plan to fill them, as the number of people seeking to resume routine hospital treatment rose to an all-time high of 6.2 million, the newspaper noted. More than 23,280 patients have been waiting for more than two years.
“Having to watch people die in such horrible circumstances, unable to see their loved ones during the pandemic, was beyond stressful; Although there was a great focus on the well-being of hospital workers, it was not enough, because this exposed the shortage of health professionals.
We brutalize our staff for months. Then, as expected, many left or retired, or moved to another country as soon as they could because it destroyed their souls. Now we are in a position where we have even fewer human resources. The consequence is in those numbers (of absences due to mental health)
.
In parallel, the Chinese megacity of Shanghai recorded its first two deaths since the March lockdown, the local government announced. The global balance of the pandemic is 504 million 439 thousand 244 infections and 6 million 197 thousand 925 deaths, according to statistics from Johns Hopkins University.
