2 min read
The Victorian Government recently announced a $9.8 million wellbeing package to support healthcare workers after 3500 were infected with COVID-19. The funds are to address issues such as staff fatigue and stress management, to provide advice, and improve peer-to-peer support. However, the focus of the various programs is on getting the affected healthcare workers to help themselves, rather than identifying and addressing the root causes of why the workers are getting infected in the first place. You can read the whole article here:
Associate Professor Ananda-Rajah, a respiratory physician, stated: “What we don’t need is more yoga, mindfulness and wellbeing Wednesdays,” she said. “What you need to do is fix the root cause of this and stop trying to push this back on to healthcare workers as if we have a problem – people are broken because we’re working within a broken system that does not appear to be caring for us or listening to us.”
Andrew Hewat from the Victorian Allied Health Professionals Association seems to agree: “We can spend money on retrospectively dealing with the fatigue, the stress and anxiety, but it’d be much better if we can address the root causes and get ahead of the game and improve the workplaces,” he said.
From the perspective of a root cause subject matter expert (and not a healthcare expert), the Victorian Government missed an opportunity to fund efforts to get to the heart of the matter; as long as the deepest-seated causes of why healthcare workers are getting infected remain unresolved, events (infections) will continue to happen.
The sad news is that we could rapidly uncover those deepest-seated causes with an investigation that enlists some of the 3500 healthcare workers, who would be more than glad to help with a causal analysis.
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