short answer: no. It happens, move on.
a bit longer answer: an elective operation with no immediate danger to a person’s life like a heart operation is going to be postponed no matter what if more than one doctor calls in sick. It also happens if there are not enough anesthesiologists.
Why I’m asking this question. On my last post somebody wrote:
Nobody deserves to have their medical treatment withheld, even temporarily, even if it was an elective procedure.
My take: the person who wrote this and all of them who upvote him don’t work in healthcare and have unrealistic expectations of what working in a hospital entails, don’t consider the workload a nurse has to endure and how the general population’s respect of nurses and doctors but specially nurses has tanked since covid.
Any heart operation is always more important than an elective one that can be safely postponed.
It’s not only a respect issue, but a literacy one as well, as many patients and their family members come to us with really stupid questions and resent us when corrected: no, statins do not cause dementia, no, the pills your friend gave you so you don’t have to inject yourself with insulin twice a day for the rest of your life so your diabetes doesn’t spike are BS and are the reason why you feel tired and dizzy.
Nurses are no longer celebrated but considered as malicious agents with a hidden agenda, insulted and struck.
I wrote sick doctors, but in emergencies or mass casualty incidents several or all elective surgeries get canceled.
Why are you advocating for taking away/delaying people’s healthcare instead of fighting for more staffing? Also, everyone has a right to healthcare and that right is more important than you nurses and doctors having an easy day
The problem is that nurses and doctors aren’t having “easy days” and if they are understaffed because of something that is not plannable, eg illness or mass casualty events, then it is critically important that they are not expected to be overworked.
Healthcare staff are already (for the most part) being pushed to their absolute limits, with very high rates of burnout.
I think the point of the OP is not to advocate taking away people’s healthcare, but rather asking for society to be more understanding of healthcare professionals when delays are necessary to save other people’s lives.
Remember that we generally as a society are fighting an uphill battle to even pay decent wages to the few staff we do have, let alone expand staffing. So while we should fight for adequate staffing, that requires people to be prepared to pay for it (through healthcare cost or increased taxes/insurance fees), and in the meantime, don’t blame doctors and nurses when they don’t have time in their 12 hour+ days for every elective procedure because someone in the unit got sick.
Because adding more staffing is really hard and will take a very long time even if we started today.
We still should be working for that ideally today, but in terms of immediate actions taking away/delaying healthcare is something that can be done today
If the doctor was intentionally made ill, whoever is responsible is to blame. Otherwise, shit happens and it’s a no harm no foul situation.
I’d argue the person who left that comment (and all those who upvoted it) are self-centered pieces of shit that seldom view others as actual human beings that can get sick. They’re Main Character Syndrome morons that cannot even think past their own existence.