For whatever reason, May has become a month for showing respect for first responders and front-line health workers.
National Nurses Week was last week from May 8 to 14. This week is National Police Week and National EMS Week.
(With our tribute sections, we decided to stagger the three, so Nursing Week and Police Week were the week prior, and EMS Week will run in this paper.
For those who are wondering, national Fire Prevention Week, which is when we have our annual salute to firefighters, will be in October. You can look forward to a special section for that week in the Mercury.
Serving as a first responder, or a front-line healthcare worker is an incredibly noble calling. In many smaller communities, your EMS workers and firefighters will be paid on-call staff rather than full-time employees, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have the requisite skills and training to save a life. They are every bit as proficient as those who work full-time.
We can be absolutely confident if we find ourselves in a situation in which we need the talents of a firefighter or an EMS employee in small-town Saskatchewan.
Of course, police officers and nurses are more likely to be full-time jobs.
Second guessing often goes with these jobs. There’s no shortage of people eager to carve the knives when a police officer or a nurse makes even the slightest mistake. The critics will be eager to rip into these professionals, and be quick to paint them all with the same brush.
A police officer going out and doing their job on a day-to-day basis is typically not viewed as news. It becomes news when that officer does something remarkable, as we’ve seen here in the past when an officer has saved someone’s life.
And it definitely becomes news when that officer is charged with a crime or with professional misconduct.
A nurse goes to work and meticulously administers care to patients over the course of their shift. That’s not news. But when a mistake occurs, it garners headlines.
EMS workers have been described as unsung heroes in the healthcare profession. In fact, our reporter Anastasiia Bykhovskaia deservedly won an award for an article last year that used the “unsung heroes” term in her headline. They often don’t get the credit they deserve.
But they often respond to situations that require them to use the skills they have to provide life-saving care, to provide treatment for a serious injury, or to quickly get a patient to a hospital, whether it be here or another community.
I have an understanding of the challenges of the jobs, not from experience but from observation. My father spent 30 years as an RCMP officer. Mom was a nurse for 38 years. My sister is an RCMP dispatcher in the very busy office in Surrey, B.C. My best friend is a sergeant with the Vancouver Police Department, and his dad was an RCMP officer.
And sometimes I wonder why someone would want to enter a profession like policing, nursing, firefighting, paramedic or even doctor, especially in times like these in which everyone has a camera, people are eager to take things out of context, and some people will post, share and believe anything they see on social media that fits their worldview.
These have always been difficult, demanding jobs, but the advents of technology in the past 20 years have created a new litany of challenges for those in these noble callings.
Many people who work in these professions have had to deal with post-traumatic stress disorder due to the scenes they have encountered on the job.
Thankfully, there is a greater understanding of PTSD than there was 15 or 20 years ago, and supports exist that didn’t exist at one time. But it’s still tough. Many still suffer in silence because they don’t know how others would react if they shared their story. So they “suck it up.”
And often we don’t know about it until it’s too late.
Others will suffer from burnout because of the long hours associated with the job.
So yes, it’s nice to have a week to salute nurses, police officers and EMTs. It’s great that we’ll salute our firefighters later this year. But let’s make sure the support and the gratitude is there for these essential services throughout the year.
