World Health Day - Dear global health leaders, it’s more than time for a “double message” on health care workers

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”...