USA Today posted an article: "Exclusive: Angry and abused, health care workers still overwhelmingly love careers, poll shows” (BUT 1 in 4 Planning to Leave).
Here are some excerpts:
Heading into the third year of a wearying pandemic, America's health care workers report significant levels of burnout, even anger about the complications of politics and rising incidents of abuse from patients and their families.
But three-fourths of them still say they love their jobs, an exclusive USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll of doctors, nurses, paramedics, therapists and others finds. It is a show of resilience, not without some costs, among those who have been on the front lines of fighting COVID-19.
"The pandemic has actually made me realize how important this career is, and how I really do make a difference," said Christina Rosa, 33, a mental health counselor from central Massachusetts who has had to close her office and see patients remotely. "I still love it."
Even so, one in four report they are likely to leave the health care field in the near future, an exodus that would represent an enormous loss of medical expertise.
Half say they are burned out.
One in 5 report feeling angry.
"We're trying to help people here and we are getting verbally and physically abused for it," said Sarah Fried, 53, of Santa Clara, California.
A nurse for 25 years, Fried now cares for leukemia and lymphoma patients in a hospital oncology unit.
Like flight attendants who have been confronted by belligerent passengers on planes, nurses at her hospital have been defied and even attacked when they tried to enforce COVID rules, including limits on those who can visit patients. Sometimes they have had to call security officers to help.
"Early in this pandemic, people were clapping for us and calling us heroes," Fried, who participated in the survey, said in a follow-up interview.
"And what happened to that? What happened to them appreciating what nurses are doing?"
Now 43% of health care workers say they are anxious, but 59% also say they are motivated and 56% are optimistic.
While 59% feel hopeful, that is a significant drop from the 76% of health care workers who reported feeling that way last year in response to the same question in a KFF/Washington Post survey.
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