Mastering Intensive Care

Intensive Care clinicians are used to being busy. Critically ill patients constantly arrive in the ICU with no awareness of staff workload at that moment. So being busy has not been the major problem of the COVID-19 pandemic. The difficult emotional responses to physical exhaustion, mental strain, heart-breaking human loss and the unpredictability of SARS-CoV-2 have been significant, and the commonly held attitude of “just power through” has not been sustainable. Instead, the most critical influence on the overall wellbeing of Intensive Care practitioners has been the degree to which they have felt supported socially. Maintaining social support and cohesion is hard. Intensive Care professionals have often depended on social support through camaraderie and workplace culture yet have been crying out during this healthcare crisis to hospital administrators, often in vain, for direct and valuable supportive measures for staff wellbeing. The pandemic has therefore required a more healing and individual-focused typ