Isn’t “orderly” just an old-fashioned name for a male nurse’s aide, who happened to do some of the heavy lifting (literally) that female aides couldn’t do?
I’m not seeing historical notes about ‘male who does things too heavy for nurses,’ possibly because nursing has been done throughout history by both males and females (the males mostly in military settings, pre-20th century).
The idea in this thread would not be limited to males, by the way. As the tasks they’d be doing might require physical strength, there might be a strength component to qualifying for the program, but that doesn’t mean all males would be accepted and all females rejected.
And, again, the proposed program could encompass “patient care assistants” or “operations assistants” or any other relevant term. “Orderlies” was mentioned because it serves the purpose of conveying ‘no college degree or further study is required to do this work.’
The word still shows up in online conversations about the health-care field, as here:
Can you cite anything that says medical staff are attributing their exhaustion even in part to doing the sort of work that doesn’t need to be done by doctors and nurses? I haven’t seen it - the only thing I’ve seen is complaints about having to clean and reuse personal protective equipment that *isn’t meant to be reused *. It’s not that the cleaning adds to their exhaustion - it’s that the mask is supposed to be changed between patients, not reused for days.
There’s no way to prove that one way or the other until PPE is freely and copiously available.
But to me it’s common sense that the work of cleaning is not only time-consuming and physically taxing, but also stresses the availability of PPE—because the process of cleaning brings the cleaner into contact with surfaces that may host live virus. (Kind of the point of the cleaning). So having more hands to do that work would be not only a physical relief, but an emotional relief, too.