Working through this latest COVID wave has been intense.
So basically from Christmas break to now, we've seen a surge with our own staff
testing positive with COVID, which is definitely scary.
I am home right now because I have caught COVID 19, the Omicron variant.
I believe I caught COVID at my workplace.
I might have to go to work earlier than expected because of the staff shortages.
As long as I'm wearing my PPE able to walk, it's done in care for patients.
I'll be asked to go in and sometimes that makes you feel kind of like a robot.
That the fact that as a healthcare worker, you're going to have to sacrifice
your health a little bit to go in and maintain the health care system.
We are on the uptick in that. The spread is starting.
My biggest concern is that we have a small pool
of highly skilled good workers, particularly nurses.
And right now those staff are being stretched
above and beyond, and I'm concerned about burnout.
My name is Katrina Sunny.
I'm a nurse SHN Centenary Site, which is located in Toronto
in the GTA and I work on the cardiac care ward.
My name is Naveed Hussain.
I'm a nurse
at the McGill University Health Center in the city of Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
I work in the psychiatry ward, but I have cared
for patients in COVID wards and in internal medicine.
My name is Inez Lewis.
I work for the Cheam First Nation in Rosedale, B.C.,
and I'm a registered nurse and health director.
It has been two years of this and we really are at the brink.
I alreaady work seven 12s in two weeks.
I've added to two nights.
I've been consistently working nine.
I still go in.
Additionally, I came in on Christmas Eve even when I want to be with my family
just to help them out.
It's had a huge impact on myself because I'm completely exhausted.
Because so many nurses are catching it.
We end up working much harder, right?
We're caring for more patients.
What happens is our ability to give that care decreases,
and that hurts.
That hurts us professionally, and that hurts our ability to care
for our patients.
So, you know, working those long hours and working short staffed
can be quite detrimental to our physical, our mental and our spiritual psyche.
The hardest part about this wave is that we're seeing the impacts
in community with mental health.
We are really worried about the folks and what they need in order to continue
on their healing journey.
Isolation is really challenging.
Some of the important services that we're seeing that
we're having to shut down is that human connection that we all need,
and particularly in the indigenous community,
the human connections of soft programing,
such as sports night, cultural nights, healing circles.
What I worry most about right now is my own family because I have to risk
bringing this home to my loved ones, including my elderly parents
who are already immune compromised as well as my five year old child, two years in
and I can't believe we've come basically full circle back to that original
first wave in that original unknown.
What keeps me up at night right now is the fact that I feel
that people are not
really understanding the fact that vaccines do work.
Vaccines work because we allow symptoms to be mild
and not major life threatening conditions.
So I've been vaccinated twice now and I've caught omicron
and it did not hit me as hard as it as it has hit the unvaccinated patients.
People were hospitalized who might end up being on ventilators and intubated.
You know, it's it's so hard to see people suffering.
Funding for indigenous health care, particularly nursing,
has been chronically underfunded before the pandemic.
So now that the pandemic is here, those resources are being stretched
so far, as well as the staffing that we've become
to find ourselves at a breaking point.
And so I think it's time that we put our heads
together, particularly with the federal government,
to look at these old funding models to see how can we better support services,
how can we increase capacity in First Nations communities and better support
nursing to meet the health disparities that the folks are experiencing?
Emotionally, I'm completely exhausted, drained.
There's days I leave work and I cry because I know that I haven't provided
that, that care that is expected of not just me by my coworkers
and everyone else, but by myself.
I feel like I've let myself down some days because I haven't been able to do that,
and mentally people don't realize that we have no visitors right now.
There's a really strict visitor policy,
and I've actually held people's hands who had to die alone.
That's something that will never leave me.
That's something that mentally I can't even explain to anybody.
What I want people out there to know is we're still in this fight.
I can tell you
firsthand the vaccine, everything, it works so people get vaccinated.
It's going to help everyone. It's going to help your neighbor.
Your family is going to help nurses like me.
It's going to help the whole system.