The COVID-19 pandemic has created disaster conditions for healthcare in the US, and has intensified the need for adaptive practices in healthcare work. Along with three critical care physicians, I carried out a collaborative ethnographic study of how ICU workers faced high patient loads, rapidly-changing expertise, shortages of personal protective equipment to hospitals, and the significant adaptive challenges for healthcare workers. From 2020-2022, we tracked how workers faced everyday dilemmas alongside their peers and with patients' families, all while working in close proximity to a contagious agent. Such changes are broadly understood as "resilience." We develop a different framework — one based in healthcare labor — to address the effects of COVID-19 on healthcare work and the very future of medicine itself.
The doctor Annalisa Silvestri during covid-19 pandemic 2020 in Italy. via WikiMedia Commons
