With the cases of ebola popping up hither and yon, we are going to see what happens when people who are tasked and trained to react to the issue have second thoughts.
An extraordinary number of Bellevue Hospital staffers called in sick on Friday rather than treat the city’s first Ebola patient — and those who showed up were terrified to enter his isolation chamber, sources told The Post.
“The nurses on the floor are miserable with a ‘why me?’ attitude, scared to death and overworked because all their co-workers called out sick,” one source said.
Sure they do. That whole ‘show up for work, go through the motions, collect a check, go home’ paradigm won’t hold up under the ‘you can catch this stuff and die’ pressure.
Wandering around the place, I’m sure that every competent and caring person that works there is thinking of those who are less competent and less capable working in positions where suddenly an error doesn’t mean a sicker or dead patient, it means dying STAFF.
I’m no medical person. That’s not my venue. However, I’ve been working for enough decades to know who can carry their load and the consequences of failing to hold up one’s end of the bargain. I work with engineers all the time and I see failures that mean problems with reliability and problems that cause schedules to slip and problems with safety. I can deal with the first two, but I don’t compromise on the third.
Put yourself in the shoes of working at a big hospital. You KNOW that the manager in charge of a critical area is competent only in the arena of corporate knob-polishing, but there he is, in a position with a title and no real clue as to what needs to be done.
Like I said: before ebola, a patient gets sick and dies. Big problem, but I, the medical worker, still get to go home at the end of the day. With ebola, the dynamics change. Now we have a situation wherein incompetence on the part of Mister Happy up the hall is going to not only get me killed, but it will give me stuff to kill my whole family in the offing.
So I ain’t going to work.
Now, let’s get a little further down the road, shall we? Bunch of cases hit the hospital. Workers aren’t showing up because in the life versus money equation, life wins out. What’s the gov gonna do, Huh? Go out and round up medicos at bayonet-point?
As was posted on The Smallest Minority, “If we have to live in a Stephen King novel, why did it have to be The Stand?”
