Health workers likely to stay home in pandemic

A new study offers a sobering glimpse of what could happen at hospitals in North America in the event of a major pandemic. Researchers at Johns Hopkins asked public health professionals how they would react if they felt their lives and those of their families were at risk. Would they go to work? Would they stay home? The answers they elicited appear to contradict the conventional wisdom about attitudes among public health workers regarding their own responsibilities. Forty-six percent of public health workers said they were "unlikely to report to work in the event of a pandemic."

"Training programs are usually focused at...increasing the workers' capabilities to perform their duties during an extreme event," comments epidemiologist Dr. Ran Balicer of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, a co-leader of the study. "But what we see here is that we should perhaps focus even more on increasing the willingness to come to work in the first place."

- see this article from Canada.com

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