Every day, healthcare personnel around the world battle from the front line to contain the virus and save lives. The images of those exhausted people struggling to save their patients have shocked the world. The safety and health of these personnel is essential for them to carry out their work during this crisis. Therefore, your protection must be a priority.
So what can be done?
1. Preserve the safety of healthcare personnel
It is of utmost importance to ensure the safety and health of health personnel and support personnel (for example, those responsible for laundry, personnel in charge of cleaning and disposing of medical waste).
Information on disease transmission should be disseminated as widely and quickly as possible to health workers, including information on the most up-to-date guidelines, measures to prevent infection, and how to apply them. Dialogue between healthcare personnel and employers is crucial for the measures and procedures to be applied correctly.
It is crucial that they have personal protective equipment, and instructions and training on how to use them correctly. In addition, COVID-19 infection testing should be as widely available as possible to preserve staff health and patient safety.
2. Protect your mental health
The pandemic places health personnel in situations of exceptional demand. They are subjected to an enormous volume of work and are sometimes seen in traumatic situations and facing difficult decisions, with an unprecedented case fatality rate, and they must also live with the fear of contracting the disease or spreading it among their relatives and relatives.
From lessons learned from other outbreaks, such as the Ebola epidemic in West Africa in 2014, it is known that health workers can experience discrimination and stigma first-hand, due to public fear of contracting the disease.
The response should include, inter alia, the provision of social assistance to teams, families and loved ones, as well as information and guidance for health workers on how to manage stress, and counseling and guidance for post-traumatic stress.
3. Monitor working hours
In emergency situations, health personnel have to work in irregular and sometimes atypical situations. In the framework of the outbreak response, many of these staff are facing an immense additional workload, long working hours, and a lack of rest periods.
It should be remembered that given the closing of schools and the confinement imposed in many countries, these people also have to organize their private lives and take care of dependents.
Appropriate working hours arrangements should be made so that health workers can balance the demands of the health service with their domestic care responsibilities and their own well-being.
4. Protect those with a short-term contract and volunteers
To fight the pandemic, several countries have reacted by resorting to short-term professional assistance, but also to volunteers and other sectors, such as the military, medical or nursing students, or retired health workers.
Although these measures are encouraging as they ensure the necessary assistance, they must be applied with care so that these workers enjoy the same labor protection as other workers.
Governments should consult with the social partners on the supervision and regulation of these special contracts, as appropriate. Account should be taken not only of occupational safety and health, but also other contractual conditions, such as social protection, remuneration, rest periods and provisions regarding hours of work
5. Hire and train more health personnel
Investments in all health systems are required to enable them to recruit, deploy and maintain a sufficient number of well-trained, supported and motivated health workers. The pandemic caused by COVID-19 again highlights the pressing need for a strong health workforce, as an element of any resilient health system, an aspect now recognized as an essential foundation for the recovery of our societies and economies, and preparing for future health emergencies.
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