Health care social workers who support medical professionals are reporting a dramatic increase in burnout in America's nursing community.  They say that the rapidly escalating surge in COVID-19 infections across the U.S. has caused a shortage of nurses and other front-line staff in virus hot spots that can no longer keep up with the flood of unvaccinated patients and are losing workers to burnout.

Not long ago, addiction recovery meant signing in to a “rehab”, attending daily meetings with your peers, intensive face-to-face therapy sessions with an addiction therapist, and reading the Big Book to guide you along the 12-Step path. The recovery process could take months or even years before the addict or alcoholic was declared ready to go it alone. Then, the pandemic.

The nation's health care system is once again faced with overwhelming need pressing against limited resources. Medical professionals, including health care social workers, are forced to make hard choices that test the ethical boundaries of medical arbitrage. The scenarios below are all real-life situations communicated to GVT by health care social workers in the past month.

The Covid-19 Pandemic has overwhelmed hospital emergency rooms in many of America’s largest cities forcing doctors and nurses to find themselves in triage mode perhaps for the first time in their careers.

With 88% of 15,400 Medicare and Medicaid-eligible nursing homes reporting as of May 31, Medicare officials rolled out a federal database showing that the nation's nursing homes had 95,515 confirmed COVID-19 cases, 58,288 suspected cases, and more than 31,782 deaths among residents and staff. The Kaiser Family Foundation quickly amended the government’s admittedly incomplete statistics reporting more than 43,000 deaths, over a third of the nation’s known coronavirus deaths.

The question of why the virus has overwhelmed some places and left others relatively untouched is a puzzle that has spawned numerous theories and speculations but no definitive answers. That knowledge, however, could have profound implications for how states, counties, and municipalities respond to the virus, for determining who is at risk and for knowing when it’s safe to go out again.

For more than 100 years American nonprofits have provided the social safety net that catches the most vulnerable before they slip beyond hope. However, although our American nonprofit infrastructure is vast and intricate, it is not invulnerable. 

At least 7,300 people living in long-term care have died in the COVID-19 outbreak, a survey of state records by ABC News found. The actual count is very likely far higher, advocates for seniors believe, in part because the available data only covers 19 states where governors' offices and state departments of health have kept track. Other states do not yet report this data and did not reply to requests for this information.

Throughout 2019, we endeavored weekly to tell the social worker's story in a way that chronicled the impact of your dedicated efforts on the welfare of the American family.

In our 2015 report, The Aging Tidal Wave, we dealt with the healthcare crisis that was about to overwhelm the long-term care industry. The aging baby-boomer population was growing rapidly while the number of caregivers was actually declining.