Rod Mackenzie (@rod-mackenzie.bsky.social)

Working in healthcare right now means being asked to do the impossible—then being abandoned to our inevitable failure The single worst stressor on healthcare workers is the gap between what their patients need and what they can deliver. The covid-19 pandemic is making this divide wider than ever, writes Esther Choo News media has been insistently describing the omicron variant as “mild,” but that is scarcely a consolation in many parts of the world, where hospitalisations for covid-19 have surged to January 2021 levels. In the US, the National Guard have been called in to relieve overwhelmed hospitals in at least 10 states.1 Similarly, in London, the military have been deployed to NHS hospitals.2 And in a rare, explicit acknowledgment that usual safety and quality standards could no longer be maintained, the District of Columbia Hospital Association (in Washington DC) submitted a written request to the mayor to waive healthcare practitioners’ liability during this time.3 The letter also asked for healthcare practitioners to be allowed to practise beyond the scope of their license, and for “flexibility” around staff to patient ratios—measures that inevitably lead to lapses in care. In a recent Kaiser Health News podcast about the healthcare response to the latest covid surge,4 the host, Julie Rovner, posed a question: “Is there a possibility that our health system just stops functioning or grinds to a halt?” A second journalist was optimistic: “We’ve been through this several … https://www.bmj.com/content/376/bmj.o197