This month, Dr. Jill Kruse, a family medicine practitioner with Avera Medical Group in Brookings and a member of the Prairie Doc® team, hosts a live discussion with Dr. Clarissa Barnes on the particular ways COVID has impacted women.
Katy Beem: I’ve been working from home and remote-schooling our third grader for over a year. The role conflict can be very demanding. How are you seeing mothers in distress in South Dakota and what has it revealed about the realities of working women who are also caretakers? What can we learn from this?
Dr. Jill Kruse: “It’s definitely been an eye-opener. My husband is an ER nurse. I’m a physician. We’re both essential workers, but someone needs to be with our third- and fourth-graders. We had to do some very creative scheduling with coworkers. Last April, nearly half of mothers living with school-aged children weren’t working. That’s really concerning, especially if your job and your health insurance are tied to each other. So, I’ve been seeing a lot more stress and anxiety. And mothers tend to traditionally take a more active role in childcare and remote learning. Lots of guys have really stepped up and come a long way, but a good majority of that falls on moms – which can lead to emotional stress and isolation.”
KB: What kind of societal shift can we make, as individuals and organizations, to address what the pandemic has revealed?
JK: “The biggest thing is not being isolated. Getting rid of the stigma of asking for help. And with medicine, we’re doing more virtual visits, where I’m talking to patients in their own homes on their devices. During COVID, we had to take care of more people all at once that were sicker than we’re used to taking care of and so we’re using technology to monitor people from their homes safely and not having to transfer patients to larger hospitals that were at-capacity. Not everyone can drive to Sioux Falls to get care, so we have to consider how to keep people connected in our geographically spread area of South Dakota.”
KB: Many moms I know don’t necessarily reach out for care unless it’s a physical sickness, thinking anxiety and stress don’t qualify. Even though we should know better.
JK: “It’s so important to find your people, to form a group of women who can support, empower, and lift each other up and feel safe to admit that you’re not perfect and you don’t have this all figured out. Facebook and the internet have helped us find each other and say ‘I see your journey and I will rally, celebrate, cry and be there for you. I’m walking the same road.’ It’s important to have another person normalize that you’re feeling stressed and overwhelmed.”
KB: What are other issues women are experiencing from the pandemic’s impact?
JK: “This topic could be 20 different shows. For example, the changes in pregnancy and delivery with COVID, where we’re limiting people in the delivery room and visitors. Or, pregnancy is right up there with diabetes and heart disease for risk of severe COVID complications, so women are wondering if it’s safe to conceive during this time, especially if they get sick and family can’t be present to support. If you’re a new mother with COVID, can you hold or breastfeed your baby? All of our rituals of how we bring life into this world have changed and not necessarily in a good way.”
KB: The ripple effect is astonishing.
JK: “When the pandemic started, we stopped doing mammograms and pap smears. Now what happens to the women who missed an early breast cancer or early pap smear change? Now that we’ve started exams again, I’ve got an entire year of patients who are behind. Getting them caught up with mammograms, colonoscopies, pap smears, it affects that work. A CDC study shows pap smears dropped 85% with California’s first stay at-home order. When that order was lifted, 25% of the exams were below normal.
On the program, we’ll also talk about staying at-home and that caregiver stress. The typical caregiver for older adults is a woman in her 40s and 50s – the sandwich generation, where you’re caring for your kids, your grandkids, and your parents. That’s hard. And most frontline caregivers are women – women hold 78% of all hospital jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Women hold 70% of pharmacy jobs and 51% of grocery store jobs. The UN Women’s World Health Organization showed violence against women increased by 25-30% during lockdown.
All of these issues, I’d love to touch on in the program, which is more than one episode can carry, but because it’s a call-in show, our audience will tell us what is important to them and where we can take this conversation. There’s definitely lots of things to talk about.” =
On Call with the Prairie Doc®
Mothers in Crisis: Pandemic Stress
SDPB1: Thursday, May 6, 7pm (6 MT)