We promise it's not all bad news, though!
This week's roundup of the healthcare supply chain news that stuck out the most includes some topics that we've covered extensively over the years: healthcare worker burnout, disruption due to climate change, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
It could very well be that the reason that these are inevitably recurring topics is that we treat them as things that are inevitable, as opposed to problems that we can solve if we take concerted, collective action. It's incredible what we can accomplish as a healthcare community if we throw enough resources behind action that will provably increase the health of our communities.
Look no further for evidence of that than the first of this week's Five To Save:
1. Vaccines for children as young as 6 months have officially been approved in the U.S., and access to vaccines for older children has been expanded.
2. As much as we might pretend otherwise, COVID-19 is not gone or even going away. In fact, the face of the U.S. government's pandemic response, Dr. Fauci, just tested positive. Strong evidence once again points out that a deep nasal swab is the most accurate testing method.
3. Supply chain disruption has most recently manifested in a nationwide shortage of tampons, which is an item that hospitals have to stock, even if it's less obvious than PPE or contrast media. The same goes for the ongoing shortage of baby formula, which hasn't been helped by production that had just started back up being halted due to one formula plant experiencing flooding.
4. You've probably been exposed to natural disasters like this more frequently recently, because their incidence goes up with climate change. And whether or not you've personally been the victim, being exposed to tragic news contributes to PTSD.
5. It seems reasonable to assume that increased stress in positions that have traditionally been shielded from it is a contributing factor in the dramatic uptick of healthcare CEO resignations.
If you're good at your job, you probably don't want to be doing it in a hospital. Of course, many clinicians don't have the option of switching sectors, so they have to renegotiate how they're paid and how much they're working. Which then puts stress on the executive team, which leads more of them to leave, which diverts resources away from improving the conditions of the employees and patients, and on and on and on.
This isn't surprising to anyone paying attention to labor in healthcare, but it's reassuring to see what we understand intuitively reflected in the data.