1 Cardiology Service, Sanatorio Delta – Rosario. 2 Cardiology Division, Hospital Italiano de La Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina. 3 Cardiology Division, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada.
Corresponding author’s address
Dr. Sebastián García Zamora
Postal address: Mendoza 1560, S2000 Rosario, Santa Fe.
E-mail
Received on September 17, 2022 Accepted after review on September 19, 2022 www.revistafac.org.ar
There are no conflicts of interest to disclose.
Keywords:
COVID-19.
Prevention
By mid-20th century, the World Health Organization (WHO) established in their constitution that health is a “state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease and infirmity”[1]. Thus, the organization established a landmark in the conception of health-disease pairing and started the process of providing significance to the psychological and social aspects of health. .
In year 2020, as a product of the modifications in the life of all of humanity due to the new Coronavirus 19 (COVID-19) pandemic, numerous publications, both national and international, have shown the deep repercussions of these modifications overlapping different aspects of health, both in patients and in health care staff. Thus, some studies in the region have documented that people experienced sadness, symptoms of depression and hopelessness, with less healthy life habits, and less adherence to chronic treatments[2,3,4].
In the most recent issue of the Revista de la Federación Argentina de Cardiología, F. Gaghero et al. have published their study titled “Burnout and work engagement in health care professionals during the COVID-19 pandemic: The role of satisfaction with job resources”[5]. First, we would like to congratulate the authors for the vast effort to realize this project. Briefly, F. Gaghero et al. surveyed 125 health care workers who carried out their work in a private institution in the city of Córdoba, with the aim of exploring the impact of work resources on “burnout” and “work engagement”[5]. They found that satisfaction with institutional resources was positively associated with “work engagement”, and that those who were unsatisfied with this domain presented more burnout.
In line with what was analyzed, and to emphasize the significance of this topic, there is a considerable amount of evidence that stress in any of its forms, including work stress, is a risk factor for the occurrence of cardiovascular events[6,7,8]. For decades now, it has been documented that health care staff is particularly vulnerable to work stress, not just due to the tasks they carry out, but also due to the context where they perform[9]. Regrettably, this reality has worsened during the pandemic by COVID-19[10]. Between the possible causes for this volatile association, episodes of violence and aggressions against the health care staff undoubtedly play a fundamental role. In a recent survey from the Interamerican Society of Cardiology, where professionals from 19 countries of the region participated, more than half of the participants manifested having suffered some event of violence during the COVID-19 pandemic, including physical aggressions in more than one in every ten participants[11]. These events were more frequent in younger women. In an alarming fashion, one in every three health care professionals, victims of aggressions, manifested having considered leaving their profession[12].
It is evident that beyond the direct impact of COVID-19 on the health of people, the pandemic has resurfaced unsolved previous problems and conflicts. .
Another great advancement of medicine over recent decades has been including preventive medicine within its foundations for action[12]. Nowadays, we know that prevention is possible at different levels, and that all scenarios where prevention can be implemented are important. However, and at the risk of resembling a tautology, preventive actions focused on mitigating the development of conditions fostering disease occurrence are more cost-effective, both in financial terms and in the health and wellbeing of individuals. Thus, the concept rises of primordial prevention, which spans actions and strategies that have as their goal to favor health and minimizing the probability of developing diseases, focusing on the environment of people[12].
Because of the frequent and impactful cardiovascular pathologies, primordial prevention in cardiology has been advancing to reach a leading position in the agenda of scientific societies and their members[12]. The work by F. Gaghero et al. is a clear example of this, both in terms of delineating a problem, and outlining possible solutions[5].
The celebrated Winston Churchill once said: “all men make mistakes, but only wise men learn from their mistakes”. Together with the vicissitudes of the COVID-19 pandemic, multiple spaces for reflection have emerged, such as this one. We consider that it is almost a moral duty to seize these opportunities to reconsider our actions, and work in an orderly and joint way to improve the reality within which we are. It is a priority to develop sustainable environments that may promote and support biopsychosocial wellbeing for all the health care staff and the community in general.
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