The next few weeks mark the beginning of the third year since COVID shifted from being a term we needed to google to being a word that’s part of virtually every conversation.
The emergency phase moved to the reactive phase (i.e. developing a vaccine) to the blame phase. And now, as every chief health officer explains, we’re in the coping phase.
COVID is still primarily a health crisis and the medical warnings make it clear it’s a long time until we’ll be seeing it in the rear-view mirror. But what we are seeing is a daily disruption that extends well beyond illness to our mental and financial well-being.
Talk about disruption used to revolve around how technology was upending our lives. But digital disruption compounded by the disruption wrought by COVID takes this to a whole new level.
What’s to be done?
The best response to disruption is to adapt by disrupting ourselves. As year three begins, I wonder if we have disrupted ourselves enough or just sought to put bandaids over the flesh wounds carved by each new twist in the COVID saga.
How can we try harder? How can we do better than just cope? Here are a few ideas:
Education
We know school will again be disrupted for most of the year as teachers are forced to stay home after either contracting or being exposed to COVID.
Even if they can come to school, they will be teaching a different cohort of pupils each day as up to half of any given class will also be forced to stay home. This might have worked in 2020, but cannot continue (particularly in Melbourne where students have already been to hell and back).
We need to disrupt the learning model. For instance, why not set up teachers to run classes remotely either from home or venues away from school? Students could then be supported through student teachers or even ably qualified parents wanting a career change.
We cannot accept that students finishing school this year or in 2023 will have had four full years of their schooling interrupted. That is failing them. And variations on the idea above already exist. For example, schools on Queensland’s Gold Coast, which lost up to one-third of its staff during border closures, taught whole classes from their NSW lounge rooms — aided by junior classroom assistants.
Small business
Without the support of the generous 2020 cash handouts, more and more businesses are folding. This is heartbreaking for their owners, but dispiriting also for the rest of us counting off the shops closing around us.
Most small businesses don’t have balance sheets to sustain shutdowns and few are willing to sign up to the lending support offered by the federal government, wary that their homes are on the line if the recovery takes years, not months.
Small businesses have put forward an innovative solution designed by the architect of Australia’s student loans scheme, Professor emeritus Bruce Chapman. It involves lending them support capital only repayable when their profits return to agreed levels.
This is the same thinking that has encouraged hundreds of thousands of Australians to study at university and can be creatively adapted to the small business sector. Why wouldn’t it work?
Mental health
We know the mental health toll the pandemic is taking on the population. Psychologists have closed their books or are offering an appointment in 2023. This will only worsen, so we need to create a workforce to triage mental illness, channelling patients where they are best serviced. Perhaps the answer is to use counsellors with months, not years, of training.
Pharmacies
Pharmacies are now able to deliver vaccines and testing and should be repositioned permanently to deliver medical services, taking pressure off GPs. Who knows? We might even save hours of time in medical waiting rooms.
Working from home
It’s doubtful whether a large chunk of the workforce will ever return permanently to city offices. How can we use those commercial buildings? It’s simplistic to turn them over to homeless accommodation. Or is it?
We should look for a better idea. Can they be used as education centres or bases for community enterprises struggling to meet the increasing social support needs?
Universities
The same goes for universities which have become truly grand palaces of learning and research but under-occupied for most of the year.
COVID has accelerated online learning and the absence of students (and staff). How can their prime real estate be put to better use and be monetised to fund the research they rightly claim has been so underfunded in this country? Surely there’s a PhD or two in that. Or could we build aged care homes on university grounds, and employ health students to boost staff numbers?
Communities are like people. They respond immediately to a crisis, but the most resilient use it to take stock of their lives and build foundations for the future. We should be like them — and not just run to an election cycle.
How would you positively disrupt things as the pandemic goes on? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name if you would like to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say column. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
An article for articles sake –
Universities – that industry was due for correction as Universities are merely industrial factories that absorb overseas peoples money from young people not bright enough to achieve a standard for attendance at their own countries Universities – at the end of the process they receive an embossed A4 sheet of paper saying they attended for 3 years some course or other and real academics were not allowed to fail them if they were not competent enough to pass the exams.
Chemists -to deliver medical services – what about medical practices to dispense PBS medications, would save the country billions – does the author really think untrained retailers should deliver medical services – same as saying medical practices should deliver veterinary services because doctor surgeries also have needles and syringes. Same looney logic.l
“Universities”? After what this government (that King roots for) did to them? …. Maybe there’s a piece somewhere about that?
What a refreshing article, canvassing ideas to make our society a better place as well as coping with the rest of this pandemic in a more intelligent way!
I was a Psychology practice manager for 14 years so am already familiar with the industry. Basically since the introduction of the mental health care plan through Medicare (Better Access) in 2006 the burden of mental health services for the community was shifted to private practice registered and clinical psychologists. They are the only cohort which attract a Medicare rebate for counselling (unless you are pregnant, then there is a rebate for pregnancy counselling).
(I don’t include psychiatrists in this post as they are clinical only, not general population).
So if you need assistance covering part or all of the fee then you must exclude counsellors. I know that psychs do many more years of study than counsellors, but the fact is that a lot, actually most of the clientele were the ‘worried well’ or people undergoing an acute phase of distress in their lives. Only a very small percentage of them had a clinical diagnosis which would require ongoing management and support. Frankly, many of those clients could have been well serviced by a good counsellor, but unless the government looks at financing some or all of the (mostly) far smaller fees that counsellors charge then this situation will contine and the societal price being paid will be far higher in terms of lives lost or diminished and human potential squandered, with the attendant millions spent on upbringing, school also wasted (to put it in purely economic terms mind you).
That is to say nothing of the immense human tragedy that engulfs us in the aftermath.
I fear that there is little to no will in this current government to do anything at all really.
I will add that I am trying to do my part to help, I am 4 months into a Diploma of Counselling online course which I started after resigning due to burnout last year.
At the moment we have the NSW minister (ha ha) for education and the so called premier telling tow different stories about how the RATs testing works. That’ll help us start the year well.
Australia has too long a history of keeping schoolchildren out of the workforce, ostensibly in case they get exploited. (And so they don’t compete with adults for the same job.) However big kids helping little kids was a well established tradition in one-teacher schools throughout the Bush. With no end in sight to a pandemic that keeps the more vulnerable old people out of the classroom, it might be time to give responsibility back to the students. Specialist teachers can guide the curriculum and class progress remotely, if they have (young-ish) teacher assistants guiding a classroom humming with big kids helping littler kids.