Kudos of the Month: Health Care Providers

GTR salutes health care providers from area hospitals, clinics, doctor offices and elsewhere who are risking their lives for the treatment of others during this COVID-19 pandemic. Tulsa area health care workers, doctors, nurses, emergency responders, aides, transport specialists, and more risk their lives every day to care for those with the potentially deadly infection.
As David Blumenthal writes in STAT Reports, “Personal courage is part of the explanation. But there’s more to it than that. What we are seeing is the professionalism of people like Anthony Fauci and thousands of health care workers at work. The essence of their professionalism is that they put the interests of patients and the public before their own.”
Blumental adds, “Professionalism is ingrained during medical training, role-modeled by the senior clinicians who teach, and reinforced by powerful aphorisms inherited from legendary practitioners going back to Hippocrates. One was the eminent Boston physician Francis W. Peabody who, in 1927, famously wrote: ‘One of the essential qualities of the clinician is interest in humanity, for the secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient.’”
He continues, “Professionalism also instills a commitment to peers who join together on the frontlines of medicine. In this way, health professionals resemble soldiers who sacrifice for their comrades in the trenches. And like the military, they accept collective responsibility for their behavior.”
Thank you, health care providers for getting us through this pandemic.