Just like air traffic controllers, doctors are confronted with dangerous burnout.
While the cause of the horrible collision between an American Airlines forest and an army Blackhawk -Heliopter is being investigated, the Washington Post made public A government report that two air traffic controllers tried to do a job for which four people were needed, including individual people who were charged to control the helicopter and traffic of wings.
The failure of the congress to respond to the danger of the understaffing of the air controller, despite A page one examination through the New York Times In 2023, explain how air traffic controllers were “pushed to the edge” could not help, but remind me of the inactivity that is so frustrating in health care.
There is the problem of health care, less acute, but no less connected to life and death than that of air traffic controllers. A American Medical Association Report On the subject describes symptoms such as “emotional exhaustion” and severe “work frustrations”. In that report, 48% of the doctors reported ‘at least one symptom of Burnout’.
There is medical debt. A wide quoted KFF -analysis of data from the Census Bureau Discovered that an amazing 41% of American adults had medical debts in 2021. What makes the burden probably heavier is that the total debt by American consumers is ‘at a record high’, according to Data quoted by Motley Fool Money. Credit card and loan arrears were “at levels that are no longer seen since the 2008 recession.”
Finally there is a medical error. A 2023 Report of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology It stated: “Patient safety is an urgent national public health problem” and mentioned a government study showing that “about one in four Medicare patients experienced side effects during their hospital admissions, where many result in catastrophic results.”
The BIDEN administration responded to that report on the World Day Safety Day in 2024 by unleashing something One publication A “blitz” of new programs and other promotions, aimed at making care safer. There was even a panel organized by patients for patient safety (US), who I co-moderated, with leaders of the Agency for Research and Quality in Healthcare, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, The The office of the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services and the Veterans Health Administration.
Thanks to the draconian orders of the Trump administration that even release harmless health data and limit virtual handcuffs on actions by career employees, those modest steps to protect Americans from each era, gender and political conviction against preventing damage a long dream. I then wrote for Forbes of “a possible turning point in the power of the patient voice in policy.” For now, that turn seems to have come a dead end.
When the modern movement of patient safety first came to life in the nineties, Dr. Lucien Leape van Harvard regularly compare the death toll with the equivalent of a crash by a 747. The point was that we would never tolerate a level of unsafe aviation. The way we tolerate unsafe patient care. Despite what the report of the Advisory Board has said, the widespread under report of errors, more than 160,000 lives have still been lost every year to prevent medical errors, according to the Leapfrog Group.
The collision of the American Airlines forens Jet and the Army Blackhawk -Helikopter that lasted 67 lives was horrible. That is also the loss of life due to dangerous medical mistakes, paralyzing medical debt and the deterioration of working conditions for doctors. And so, whether we are in aviation or healthcare, we continue to strive for change.
“He who saved one life,” says the Talmud, “is as if he saved the whole world.”