I have little desire to turn this space into a forum for political arguments. That said, we are barely recovered as individual healthcare workers, a healthcare system, and a country, from the pandemic and some of the political mishandlings that happened during the pandemic.

Healthcare has never been easy, but we all have felt the shifts since the pandemic that have made it exponentially more difficult. Everyone has been so much more on edge. And now we stand on this precipice of chaos that is simply unimaginable. It feels easy to imagine the worst, hard to imagine the best, as we see Trump’s picks for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and Dr. Mehmet Oz to oversee the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. These are reckless choices, with appalling disregard for basic science and the most preventable diseases.

Robin Cogan, MEd, RN, NCSN, FNASN, FAAN, is a very experienced and well-known school nurse and leader, who has expressed the concerns I too have for the health of our nation, if these nominations go through. In this post, she gives us an email template to use, if we would like to reach out to our local congressman to voice our concerns and ask them to vote against the nominations.

I have grave concerns for the well-being of the general public, and for our own stamina as healthcare workers, with these nominations pending. I know our work still matters, even with everything seeming to increasingly be against us. But our hearts and sanity matter too, and I can’t help but wonder if we will be able to stay sane in our work in these next four years.