Health Workers: Overworked, Burned Out, and Overstressed? - Essay Sample

Introduction

Health workers form a critical aspect of healthcare since they are active rather than passive agents within these systems. With looming health crises, increased mortality, decreased life expectancy, and quality of life, human survival has been entirely placed in the hands of healthcare workers. However, while such a responsibility has been bestowed to them, many health workers are overworked, burned out, and overstressed, and to those who cannot get the support they need, they end up quitting or failing to deliver what is expected of them. The global health crisis is a phenomenon compounded by social and political issues such as political and economic instability and poverty, and these factors end up affecting the efficacy of health workers. The HIV pandemic, underinvestment in healthcare, and brain drain have maimed the abilities of health workers to deliver services to the communities they serve (Chen et al., 2004). The author's main idea, therefore, lies on the premise that the global health crisis can be overcome by creating a vibrant healthcare system through looking at the situations that health workers work in and making them better. The ideas have been arranged systematically and topically, making it seamless.

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The primary purpose of this article is to highlight the vitality of healthcare workers to the overall success of a healthcare system. From past experiences, seasons of successful health systems have always been accompanied by a functional human resource in terms of density, income, gender equality, and education. However, the shortage of workers, to a 4 million threshold, globally, creates the foundation of the global health crisis (Chen et al., 2004). The situation is wanting in low-income countries such as sub-Saharan countries since they have to add about 1 million workers through recruitment, retention, and training to attain the millennium development goals (MDGs) (Chen et al., 2004). Human resources drive the healthcare system, but with skill imbalances, poor working environments, migration, unequal distribution of human resources, and weak knowledge bases, the health crisis is inevitable. The impact of this article to the reader is that it sensitizes them to critically assess the healthcare organization like any other organization that demands the effectiveness of the workers to succeed. It thus creates a perspective that healthcare does not merely rely on pharmaceutical and monetary resources, and that the human resources are the most vital input.

A variety of strategies have been formulated to address the issue of human resources concerning healthcare. Management of the workforce is thus viewed as an essential tool to go about this. Three objectives have been formulated as well regarding the social and physical coverage, motivation, and competence of the health workers through education and skill training (Chen et al., 2004). The improvement of the transnational flow has also been explored as a pathway that will reduce brain drain and thus facilitate the retaining of local medical skills and talents. Brain drain usually occurs as a product of economic disparities, thus making many qualified personnel from economically marginalized nations to seek greener pastures in developed countries. The most outstanding idea has been the idea of putting workers first in the healthcare sector. This has similarly been granted urgency and priority. Mobilizing healthcare workers in healthcare crises, improving sustainability, and the development of a comprehensive knowledge are three strategies that can aim at putting workers first (Chen et al., 2004). The workforce in a healthcare system demands high economic investment, and it is thus surprising for the authors to emphasize on the importance of the workers, even before considering the financial burden that comes with their input. From the human resource management discipline, the criticality of the human resources is usually emphasized, and therefore, a majority of the information in this article was not new.

The global health crisis is a phenomenon that is complex as it is usually caused by a variety of intertwining and sometimes opposing factors. However, the workforce within the healthcare system has been presented as a critical factor, one that can be utilized to end the crisis or one that can cause the health crisis to worsen. Therefore, it is only by developing the human resources or the workforce, that all the other resources can be coordinated, and healthcare equality and quality of care be attained.

Reference

Chen L., Evans T., Anand S., Boufford J. I., Brown H., Chowdhury M., ... & Wibulpolprasert S. (2004). Human resources for health: overcoming the crisis. Lancet 364(9449). Pp. 1984-90. Doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(04)17482-5