Reply #31: And then there's this, from the same report.

[vickitulsa]

"Burnout and Compassion Fatigue

Thirty-three percent of BH personnel reported high burnout, 27% reported low motivation, and 22% reported low morale. Fifteen percent agreed that the stressors of deployment impaired their BH job. If our providers are impaired, our ability to intervene early and assist Soldiers with their problems may be degraded. It is vital to understand the processes of provider burnout and compassion fatigue in order to prevent and intervene in order to preserve the care in our caregivers."


And just who are these caregivers?

According to the report, they are the Psychiatrists, Occupational Therapists, Psychiatric Nurses, Clinical Psychologists, Social Workers, Health Care Specialists, and Mental Health Care Specialists. Those with these MOS's serving incountry in Operation Iraqi Freedom are the ones who are reporting such disturbingly high levels of burnout, low motivation, and low morale.

I wrote a term paper years ago on nurse burnout in the United States health care system for the public. It was an eye-opening bit of research, and I understand all too well how drastically such burnout problems might be compounded in a military Area of Operations where the health care providers themselves are suffering low morale and impairment of their ability to give sufficient care to their patients -- our soldiers.

Whether it's the dangers to their own lives due to being in or near combat zones or the frustration of trying to help soldiers suffering from mental health problems when the underlying cause of those problems is ongoing, we can't accurately assess without more information. But the RESULT of low morale and impaired ability to do their jobs for mental health care providers is that they then become statistics in their own right. THEY have suicidal ideation and sometimes make suicide attempts.

It reminds me of the absolute futility health care providers incountry during Vietnam felt in the field (the medics and corpsmen), in the MASH units, and in base hospitals as that war dragged on for years. "China Beach," the TV series about one MASH-type hospital in Vietnam which aired during the late '80's, portrayed many of the effects of such futility and frustration upon doctors and nurses.

I know many Gulf War vets (W's daddy's ME war) who continue to suffer significant PTSD and other long-term mental health problems as well as medical problems from their service in that war. Now just a decade later we're going to be welcoming home, probably not en masse but in smaller groups as well as individually, literally hundreds of thousands of veterans from W's Iraq war. With their attendant problems based on their service for our country.

I have thought ever since we began hearing about IED's in Iraq that there probably isn't anything more likely to create monumental cases of PTSD than the omnipresence of those surprise attack devices. And with the body armor capability improved to the point the heads and torsos of our troops are pretty well protected, we are seeing dramatically high levels of amputations of limbs from this war. I watched a History Channel program last night about Rwanda, where the use of machetes during the massacres there in 1994 left so many people alive but limbless. And Vietnam today, where the leftover "anti-personnel" mines there continue to this day to kill and maim children and adults alike.

Pictures of armless and legless United States veterans, though, are bound to be working on the thought processes of the American public. I hope such tragic visions are having the right effect on them....