Beds Still Burning

So when Midnight Oil’s Beds Are Burning song popped onto my Sony Walkman in 1987, I thought my life had changed. It did, I just had no idea how, and how that one song would become a precursor for healthcare in America now 38 years later. At the time, Beds Are Burning was my anthem, it helped me survive being outside the high school cool kids.  I wrote an essay for Mrs. March’s Writing For College Class about that song – about its musicality, the beat, and how it called on people to give back to society. Only thing, I was way off – wildly missing the point. March gave me what I now realize was a generous C+. “How do we sleep while our beds are burning?” It’s a metaphor, she wrote – those lyrics highlighted conditions in Australia, the displacement of indigenous aboriginal people and the avoidance of problems no one wanted to fix. I had missed the point of that line and that song, but if not for loving Midnight Oil’s cassette I would not have written that essay and wouldn’t have gotten a lesson in metaphor, which has helped shape the thousands of essays I’ve written since.  The healthcare system is having its own Beds Are Burning moment I believe.  579 nursing homes closed from 2020 to 2023, some 21,000 residents were displaced by this and continue to be with beds declining and staff shortages rising. Hospitals are having their own problem with beds - I blamed an addiction and mental health crisis causing ED overcrowding, but a physician—much like Mrs. March in high school—said I missed the point. “The ED is like a pipe,” he said. Overcrowding is due to inflow and outflow and these days one of the biggest problems is outflow. Hospitals care for sicker patients that stay longer and require more staff, and many have empty beds because they can’t find enough staff.  So when we decide that a patient needs to be admitted, there is often no space in the ICU or on the floors.  This is even more problematic for mental health patients I’ve witness who often wait days for a bed, or often end up transferred to hospitals or treatment centers far away. The pipe was the metaphor. The beds are burning, again….only question now, I suppose, is how to inspire, train and place more nurses, primary care physicians, and mental health workers. If we don’t, people only get older and conditions only get worse….unless maybe we don’t sleep and opt instead to burn the midnight oil.