Updating The Nurse's Poll
# 1997
The debate began on the allnurses forum, the online home to thousands of health professionals, on October 29th of last year. In late April, a poll was added.
Since then it has sparked nearly 270 responses, and the poll now has almost 800 respondents.
I last updated this story 12 days ago, and since then 220 more people have weighed in with their opinion. The numbers, while they may have fluctuated slightly, remain pretty constant.
The scenario is that it is a severe pandemic, with a high death rate, and that the hospitals have run out of adequate PPE's. The question is, to nurses, would you work?
The results are basically that less than half say they would stay on the job, while roughly 22% are undecided. 30% say they won't work under those conditions.
While the poll is telling, it is the nearly 270 comments, often involving a heated debate, that is most illustrative. This discussion is vitally important and should be read by every hospital administrator, health care worker, pandemic planner, and government official in the country.
Most health care workers want to continue working in a pandemic, but many feel let down and abandoned by their employers. They see little or no attempt to educate, or adequately prepare for a pandemic on the part of most health care facilities.
How any nation will fare during a pandemic will depend, in large part, on how well their health care system holds together. This is an issue we dare not ignore.
Earlier this week I ran some rough numbers on the numbers of PPE's health care facilities would need to see them through one pandemic wave. Our national strategic stockpile has, at last count, over 155 million surgical masks and respirators; this total includes 104 million N95 respirators and 52 million surgical masks.
There are, of course, some in the supply chain, and some in hospital and EMS supply closets. But I doubt if there will be more than 500 million masks on hand going into a pandemic here in the United States. With worldwide demand, masks will quickly go on allocation. Resupply will be difficult, if not impossible.
Assuming that only 1/2 of US Health Care professionals continue to work in a pandemic (roughly 6 million), they'd consume 240 million masks a week.
Or 1 Billion masks a month.
And of course they will need gloves and gowns, and decontamination facilities for when they go off-shift.
If nothing is done, one week . . . two weeks . . perhaps three weeks into a pandemic our PPE's will run out. At that point, we will lose a good chunk of the Health Care work force.
Worse, there will be millions of HCW's who will stay on the job, even without protection. And the attrition rate due to the virus may be very high. Illness and possible death is a terrible reward for dedication and service. Particularly when it could be avoided.
While preparing is both expensive, and daunting, this is something we must do.
The stakes are too high to do otherwise.
