Please stop calling healthcare workers ‘heroes’. It’s killing us www.theage.com.au/national/…

We need to talk. It’s not that we don’t appreciate being appreciated. We do. But this ‘healthcare heroes’ nonsense is actually killing us. All over the world, people have clapped for healthcare workers, banged pots and pans out of their windows, praised us to the heavens and it’s not like there isn’t a roll call of the fallen to justify it all.

… Taiwan learned the lessons of the 2003 SARS epidemic and was ready, as was Vietnam. Canada, which itself had a SARS outbreak in 2003, failed to learn those lessons, as have most other English-speaking countries. There is a pattern here, a pattern of anglophone hubris, in which a disregard for the evident successes of Asian nations in protecting their healthcare workers borders on racism.

We need to forget the “hero” narrative, get serious about building a robust safety culture for our healthcare facilities and embark on the hard work and attention to detail required to re-engineer our system into one that works to protect us all.