Tribune. A fifth wave of Covid-19 reaches the shores of the hospital, with its now familiar corollary: the fear of the overflow of our reception capacities. But this time, a new element is added to this critical situation: the dramatic worsening of the shortage of caregivers. The gap is everywhere and thousands of beds are closed. But where have they all gone, these caregivers who were recently applauded? In town or in the hospital, why do they flee this world of care that they had nevertheless chosen? Could we make them want to stay or come back?
At the age of 7, I chose medicine because I wanted to change the world. No doubt politics, economics or education might also have been suitable, but I chose medicine.
Being a caregiver means refusing to endure and deciding to act. To refuse the suffering of the other, to accept to hear it, to touch it and to try to relieve it. Whether we are a doctor, a nurse, a caregiver, we are all first and foremost caregivers, and we want to change the world as it is, with the hope that it will get a little better followingwards.
With age and experience, I have understood that I will not change the world … but maybe a little piece of the world all the same? Like the hummingbird of Native American legend, and like all caregivers, I try to do my part. A relieved pain, a reassured patient, a supported family, that may be enough to give meaning, to say that we did well to get up this morning and that we will come back tomorrow.
Race to the abyss
I also see that I cannot change the world on my own. This requires a whole hospital, this unique place which unconditionally welcomes all suffering, big or small, but which is also a big machine, and which needs, in order to function, multiple skills, sometimes far removed from care. It is therefore necessary that a common language can be developed between caregivers and managers, which makes it possible to understand each other, to get along, to take into account each other’s constraints in order to answer this single question: how to provide better care? If the hospital is not entirely focused on this mission of “taking care”, it is heading for the abyss, and so are we.
Imperceptibly, for years, the distance has widened. The one who decides has moved away from the one who heals, and it is more and more difficult to speak the same language. The feeling has grown that the decisions taken are no longer taken only with a view to providing care, but that they are subject to other imperatives – financial in particular; important imperatives, of course, but which should be subordinated to the requirements of care.
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