Why is there an 8,9 hour waiting time in the Emergency Departments across the country?
I have spent 2 years in the mids of the covid19 pandemic.
Facing the unknown at the beginning, never really knowing if I will get sick or not. Some colleagues got intubated, some spent weeks on ITU. But it's ok, this is what we signed up to, and hey at least it made it a priority for me to take out life insurance in case I do die.
But what is NOT OK with me is what we are NOT telling our patients, and thus we keep failing them day in and day out. The fact that governments globally keep ignoring the lifestyle advice that could have prevented so many serious admissions and deaths is NOT OK.
Yes vaccines are great.
Yes social distancing, washing hands & masking up great too.
But we must not stop at this advice, because non of these measure address the reason why so many patients with underlying (preventable)chronic diseases were most severely affected.
FACT: Patients with lifestyle related chronic conditions such as: heart disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and the combination of many of these diseases etc. had the most severe response to COVID19.
These patients had an increased rate of morbidity and mortality when compared to those who did not suffer from predisposing conditions.
FACT: These lifestyle diseases can be prevented, treated and even in many cases reversed with cost effective strategies
We know that even before the COVID19 pandemic started, our patients had long been presenting with lifestyle related chronic diseases.
Instead of taking this opportune moment to educate our patients and our communities about the importance of building healthy lifestyle practices we continue to keep this information away from the public as if we had some sort of unspoken agenda to keep our nation sick and make them sicker!!!
National, global guidelines should be bringing lifestyle education full force into the frontlines! Since they are not doing it, we must make it our own agenda and do all we can to empower our patients, one by one.
Doing anything else, means we are not doing our job, and we will continue to miss the opportunity to heal.