The medical community has been run ragged over these last 18 months. One of the mental challenges is the fact that we’ve had successive waves of infections. Just when we think that with vaccines we have the virus in retreat (May of this year) there is a resurgence (the delta variant).
See this story on the medical community and its staff: “
Why It’s Hard To Gauge How Workers’ Burnout Is Affecting Patient Care.”
I’ve heard that emergency managers are experiencing these same feelings of burnout too. Certainly not to the same degree as the medical community, but the pandemic has dragged on. On top of it, in portions of the nation there have been heat emergencies, drought, wildfires, water supplies drying up, storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding — the beat goes on.
The last of the “older” emergency managers are moving on to retirement and the next generation of leaders are taking their positions in the career field. For some it will be a baptism of fire from disasters — but, that is how you learn.
Sustaining the pace of disasters and their frequency and larger impacts will weigh heavily on the profession in the coming years.
Look at all the public health directors who retired or quit during the pandemic due to the pressures they felt, not only from performing their jobs, but from an unsatisfied or outright hostile public who they were trying to serve. When disaster response efforts falter in the future, the public angst can certainly start to be trained on emergency management leaders. Become prepared to deal with that reality.
Eric Holdeman is a contributing writer for Emergency Management magazine and is the former director of the King County, Wash., Office of Emergency Management.
