Tomorrow, 7
April, it’s World Health Day, this time with the theme ‘support
nurses and midwives’. As you know, this year is also the International Year of
the Nurse and Midwife. Against that backdrop, it’s more than cynical to see
so many (especially) female health workers in the frontlines of the fight
against Covid-19 without proper personal
protective equipment (PPE). Many are already dying or will die due to the lack of PPE.
We hear a
lot of talk and rhetoric about “our health worker heroes” now, but we have clearly
failed to give too many of them, both in “developed” and developing countries, proper
protection. This is something our same governments (certainly in the West) would never allow for
their soldiers going to war. Just ask some of the defense ministers, used to
hundreds of billion dollar- budgets.
And if they
did, the soldiers would go on strike, rightly so.
I’m not a
health worker myself, but I happen to have quite some health staff among my
family members, both nurses and doctors. And it’s blatantly clear at this
moment in which settings some of them feel well protected while others say this
feels like a sick Russian roulette.
Hence, I
hope that dr. Tedros and many other global health leaders, in addition to their
consistent messages on health worker heroes (not wrong, clearly) also provide
an important add-on: that health workers without proper PPE have the right to
strike, to quit, and/or ‘stay healthy at home’.
As long as
the global bottleneck on material is not
solved (which might take weeks or more probably months), every health worker without
proper PPE should be given the choice
whether he or she wants to continue, making an assessment for him/herself
whether the risk is acceptable. These health workers also have families, many
of them belong to risk categories themselves or have underlying health
conditions. Yes, that would lead to many more innocent Covid-19 victims, but
these health workers are not the ones to blame for the situation. And you can’t
expect everybody to be a ‘hero’, if ‘heroism’ resembles for some ‘going to war
like WW I soldiers getting out of their trenches to face machine guns”.
They need
PPE. Full stop.
If not
complemented this way, the rhetoric of ‘health worker heroes’ feels just like empty
waffling. So I hope dr. Tedros and his team start providing this double message
at their media briefings. Certainly this World Health Worker week. And while
they’re at it, they can then sketch a fairer – well resourced -world for health
systems & workers, and where the money can be found for that. It’s not that
difficult, really. You don’t need to envisage a grand “Apollo plan” or public
health “Moonshot”...
