Isolated and unmotivated front-line health workers ignored pandemic crisis declarations and threw out dusty emergency plans as they improvised how to allocate scarce resources during COVID-19, a study has found.
Five public health researchers published the study Friday in JAMA Network Open. They interviewed 21 doctors and two nurses providing direct care to COVID-infected patients in California, Idaho, Minnesota and Texas from December 2020 to December 2021.
The failure to execute an extended crisis plan occurred across institutions and regardless of each state’s pandemic politics, said Dr. Catherine Butler, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor at the University of Washington Medical Center. “Ultimately, there’s not going to be a single plan that works for such a complex situation and we need to work on overlapping strategies,” said Dr. Butler, who practices medicine in the Veterans Administration Puget Sound Health Care System. “As a country, we need to explicitly acknowledge that healthcare resources are finite and build structures to support clinicians and promote fair treatment of patients.
Another clinician at an Idaho community hospital noted that administrators “never activated our triage committee” to decide with fairness which patients received access to resources.
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