Discussions

While all workers across Canada and around the world are being affected by COVID-19, healthcare workers as a group are most heavily feeling its impact. This is because of their pivotal role in the treatment of people infected with the virus and their high COVID-19 exposure as part of their job. As such, maximizing efforts to enable the healthcare workforce to remain free of COVID-19 infection, and stay in good physical and mental health, is essential to the response and management of COVID-19.

Longevity in medicine necessitates some degree of desensitization. This is part of how we grow. It’s essential. This evolution, however, can come with a cost. With our competence comes the insidious erosion of empathy that creeps in, hand-in-hand with our competence, quietly, relentlessly, and destructively.

As the pandemic wore on, it became increasingly clear that our normal, pre-pandemic lives were bound for the past tense. As a resident in family medicine, I wondered what this might mean for our patient relationships. Would we develop the same rapport, or be able to guide our patients through maintaining health and treating illness as closely and meaningfully as before?