One evening in May, nursing assistant Debra Ragoonanan’s vision blurred during her shift at a state-run Massachusetts veterans home. As her head spun, she said, she called her husband. He picked her up and drove her to the emergency room, where she was diagnosed with a brain aneurysm.
It was the latest in a drumbeat of health issues that she traces to the first months of 2020, when dozens of veterans died at the Soldiers’ Home in Holyoke, in one of the country’s deadliest covid-19 outbreaks at a long-term nursing facility. Ragoonanan has worked at the home for nearly 30 years. Now, she said, the sights, sounds, and smells there trigger her trauma. Among her ailments, she lists panic attacks, brain fog, and other symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition linked to aneurysms and strokes.
Scrutiny of the outbreak prompted the state to change the facility’s name to the Massachusetts Veterans Home at Holyoke, replace its leadership, sponsor a $480 million renovation of the premises, and agree to a $56 million settlement for veterans and families. But the front-line caregivers have received little relief as they grapple with the outbreak’s toll.
“I am retraumatized all the time,” Ragoonanan said, sitting on her back porch before her evening shift. “How am I supposed to move forward?”
Covid killed more than 3,600 U.S. health care workers in the first year of the pandemic. It left many more with physical and mental illnesses — and a gutting sense of abandonment.
What workers experienced has been detailed in state investigations, surveys of nurses, and published studies. These found that many health care workers weren’t given masks in 2020. Many got covid and worked while sick. More than a dozen lawsuits filed on behalf of residents or workers at nursing facilities detail such experiences. And others allege that accommodations weren’t made for workers facing depression and PTSD triggered by their pandemic duties. Some of the lawsuits have been dismissed, and others are pending.
Health care workers and unions reported risky conditions to state and federal agencies. But the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration had fewer inspectors in 2020 to investigate complaints than at any point in a half-century. It investigated only about 1 in 5 covid-related complaints that were filed officially, and just 4% of more than 16,000 informal reports made by phone or email.
Nursing assistants, health aides, and other lower-wage health care workers were particularly vulnerable during outbreaks, and many remain burdened now. About 80% of lower-wage workers who provide long-term care are women, and these workers are more likely to be immigrants, to be people of color, and to live in poverty than doctors or nurses.
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Some of these factors increased a person’s covid risk. They also help explain why these workers had limited power to avoid or protest hazardous conditions, said Eric Frumin, formerly the safety and health director for the Strategic Organizing Center, a coalition of labor unions.
He also cited decreasing membership in unions, which negotiate for higher wages and safer workplaces. One-third of the U.S. labor force was unionized in the 1950s, but the level has fallen to 10% in recent years.
Like essential workers in meatpacking plants and warehouses, nursing assistants were at risk because of their status, Frumin said: “The powerlessness of workers in this country condemns them to be treated as disposable.”
In interviews, essential workers in various industries told KFF Health News they felt duped by a system that asked them to risk their lives in the nation’s moment of need but that now offers little assistance for harm incurred in the line of duty.
“The state doesn’t care. The justice system doesn’t care. Nobody cares,” Ragoonanan said. “All of us have to go right back to work where this started, so that’s a double whammy.”
‘A War Zone’
The plight of health care workers is a problem for the United States as the population ages and the threat of future pandemics looms. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called their burnout “an urgent public health issue” leading to diminished care for patients. That’s on top of a predicted shortage of more than 3.2 million lower-wage health care workers by 2026, according to the Mercer consulting firm.
The veterans home in Holyoke illustrates how labor conditions can jeopardize the health of employees. The facility is not unique, but its situation has been vividly described in a state investigative report and in a report from a joint oversight committee of the Massachusetts Legislature.
The Soldiers’ Home made headlines in March 2020 when The Boston Globe got a tip about refrigerator trucks packed with the bodies of dead veterans outside the facility. About 80 residents died within a few months.
Source : Kaiser Health News