Articles: pandemics.
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As the staffing crisis in the UK deepens, it is time for the policy-makers and professional bodies to rethink the approach to the most vital and yet most fragile component of the healthcare system-the human beings. The austerity measures, combined with pandemic and more recently the vision of a backlog with attached unrealistic expectations of tackling it, have brought the NHS and many other healthcare systems to the brink of a crisis. It is a human factors approach, which emphasises clinician's well-being as the core aspect of optimising performance that should become our goal. ⋯ The pandemic served to highlight this quite clearly. Also, an injured, tired or burn-out healthcare professional cannot be expected to repair the system that has precipitated his or her condition. The approach to changing the culture of medicine may be multifaceted, but ultimately, we should rethink professionalism and the definition of duty of care putting emphasis on the well-being of those delivering the care as the way to assure best possible care.
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Acta Anaesthesiol Scand · Aug 2022
Multicenter StudyWho gets the ventilator? A multicentre survey of intensivists' opinions of triage during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a shortage of intensive care resources. Intensivists' opinion of triage and ventilator allocation during the COVID-19 pandemic is not well described. ⋯ Intensivists appeared to prioritise younger patients for ventilator allocation. The tendency to consult colleagues about triage decreased with age and male gender. Many found such tasks to be not purely medical and that authorities should assume responsibility for triage during resource scarcity.
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It is unknown how U.S. adults' relative harm perceptions of E-cigarettes versus cigarettes and associated behaviors changed during the E-cigarette or vaping product use‒associated lung injury epidemic (late 2019) and COVID-19 pandemic (since early 2020). ⋯ Perceptions of E-cigarettes as more harmful than cigarettes increased sharply between 2019 and 2020. Increases in tobacco product use were potentially guided by product-specific relative harm perceptions because changes occurred primarily in individuals who perceived their preferred product as relatively less harmful, suggesting the need for accurate messaging of relative and absolute product risks.