(Maya Angelou)

This is the time to do better for our struggling healthcare work force. A profession who’s suffering often goes unnoticed. Heroes who do not want to fall. Heroes who carry grief, guilt, anger, and shame as they work in a system that sets them up to be fallen heroes.

I will never forget that shift in the fall of 2003. As a young nurse, it was the evening that brought forward the dangers of my profession. I was charge nurse at a local twin cities hospital and approached a shift where one of our nurses did not show up for work, which was very out of character. My call to Human Resources, followed by a call to the police lead to the tragic discovery of Linnette’s self-inflicted gunshot wound. A young, driven, and capable nurse who hid her suffering for fear of retribution and shame. Heavy emotions of grief that swallowed her up and the hamster wheel she could not see a way off from.

A suicide note revealing the PTSD she quietly suffered from. The guilt she carried post a tough shift when life turned into death. The space she felt she had no way to improve, the space where her voice went unheard, and the space that contained little to no hope for change. A fallen hero who no one protected.

Here I am 25 years later and I have lost count of my healthcare colleagues in every discipline who have pulled me aside to secretly share their suffering. My dearest friend since day one of nursing school who now works as a DNP recently shared the following sentiments. “My job is like an abusive relationship. You want it to get better but it never does, instead the hits just keep coming and building in intensity.”

Healthcare workers jobs in the U.S. involve demanding and sometimes dangerous duties, including exposure to infectious disease, grueling work hours, and violence from patients and their families. Most work days are short staffed, yet, include being at the bedside offering life saving measures and compassionate care during each patients’ worst day and worst moment.

WeCare has an opportunity to offer tangible and significant solutions to our Healthcare workers burn out, declining personal well-being, and deep professional wounds. To offer new solutions to a problem our healthcare systems are seemingly unable to solve. We have an opportunity to change the trajectory of our Healthcare workers own health, which they deserve, and all of us benefit from.

This battlefield is right in our own backyards. I do not pretend to have all the answers to this deeply rooted and complex problem. Yet, I do know better and I believe this is exactly the right time for WeCare to step in and do better!

This is the public health crisis that will eventually impact each and every one of us. Another modern day pandemic unfolding before our own eyes.

It is time to offer meaningful and impactful services, products, and events that allow our healthcare workers to put their own oxygen mask on first. WeCare can now change our community’s holistic health and wellness from the top down. A new future that offers hope for a new, better, and healthier future. Recognizing it starts with caring for the healthcare professionals that care for us.