Everything is so stressful these days. When are we going to relax?
You can wear PPE to minimise Covid transmission.
You can’t wear shit to stop shit hitting you left right and centre. That’s how stress overcomes you, kick you when you’re already down.
The Government kept underfunding for over a decade, the local Trust has to run with the bear minimal. Is it a little wonder we’re at this point today?
So under payed, understaffed and over worked dtaff results in stress, sickness, and resignations. This, even on purely economic grounds is a very long way from optimal. It’s not surprising it costs more to provide a worse service and this is compounded by a most unsupportive Gov’t. A Gov’t whose score for building new hospitals is 0 from the 40 they promised.
The NHS has been in crisis for as long as I can remember but you get the feeling that things are really starting to come to a boil now. Longer Ambulance wait times, GPs becoming inaccessible, rolling strikes. The Tories wanted it to fail and that’s exactly what’s happening. Trouble is, they’ve got no solution to fix it. There’s no money to be made for Virgin or Kaiser or whoever else because we’ve got money to give them.
I work in admin for the NHS, and we have had loads off with stress this past year
any work that requires you to go full speed all day every day will have massive absences due to stress and burn out. these people will be out from working for longer than the time you saved by having them going full speed so you create a vicious cycle of burn out even when you have more staff than you need since people are burned out.
NHS frontline staff raise issues such as increased patient demand/lack of resource/low pay but instead of these issues being seen as system wide problems, they are individualised and and a managerial emphasis is instead put on ‘staff wellbeing’, mindfulness webinars and individual staff being asked what they can do to make things better.
As a result the real source of the stress (increased demand, poor nursing pay, falling real terms spending per head on healthcare) is never addressed but managerial figures can suggest they have ‘done something’ to address the problem by suggesting staff ‘take care’ of themselves through wellbeing initiatives.
In my view this reflects a broader malign trend in the UK where social, economic or political problems are individualised and the real source of the problem is unaddressed.
For example, if you have have low pay, you must be the problem and work harder? if you feel depressed, its not because you live in poor housing, its your thinking thats the problem!
Worst idlers in the world, according to Liz Truss and her gang of morons.
Its everywhere
Not one part of the public sector has come out of the pandemic working anywhere near as well as they did beforehand. Statutory Sick Pay tends to concentrate the mind out here in the real world.
Can confirm. The amount of times I’ve been chewed out by NHS staff for asking basic questions or basic follow up when clearly someone on their end fucked up (yes, I was only politely asking). Only a burnt out person on edge can lash out at a parent asking politely the first time about their childs appointment. Turns out they couldn’t copy a phone number from the letter to their system right and overrode all contact information. Or when they dropped me from their patient list behind my back because they overrode my address due to another clerical mistake and sent the letters to some rando in another town altogether. Decades of orchestrated shitfuckery. Just pay and staff them enough, it ain’t hard and everyone is better off in turn.
I’m guessing that’s not even the real figure. How many people took days because of stress but felt they’d need to give a more physical reason for being off?
This is the problem with having everything running at 110% all the time. We treat public sector staff in such an inhumane manner, tell them they can’t complain unless they’re also earning below minimum wage etc. etc. we’ve all seen it countless times at this point.
What I don’t understand is why? Why do people suddenly seem to think *doctors and nurses* of all people aren’t incredibly hard workers who probably should not be being made every hour God sends for a barely-average salary?
Not just the impact it is having on current staff, but looking forwards to the future how are we going to replace them? Medicine was always supposed to be for the best and brightest. Which of our best and brightest aged 16 today are looking at the NHS and thinking fuck yeah I’m going to put myself in for all the placements and push myself super hard to get A*-everything so I can spend 5+ years and £50,000 on a medicine degree to make myself eligible for a job that will literally make me ill from overwork and stress while paying me a *fraction* of what every other English speaking country would pay me?
Not that surprising if you’ve seen what’s happened over the last couple of years. It’s not just the NHS either, all the related services and agencies too. From government departments, to local authorities, to care homes staff, to cleaners and suppliers , everyone is burnt out. Everything has been straining at the seams for 3 years, experienced staff are retiring or changing industries to get away and newcomers are put off quickly and leave again. No one has time for training, development, personnel management, forward planning or even just looking after themselves. The NHS and related systems would probably have already collapsed in it wasn’t for the amount of unpaid overtime that people put in.
Covid is also behind a lot of that. Covid causes significant absences with illness and that ramps up the workload on those that remain. Frontline healthcare workers are the hardest hit group in the country by Long Covid which means a lot of people who can’t work or working reduced hours and can’t do certain tasks all resulting in more pressure on the remaining able bodied staff. Combined all that with a massive increase in workload from Covid, Flu and RSV that weren’t there in prior years and its a soup for being overloaded.
The big problem which can not be resolved is you can’t just magic up healthcare staff. Every country has significant strain on their healthcare system from the same pressures and the NHS started out less prepared than most so its fairing worse than the others but there isn’t a big sea of doctors and nurses to be pulling from to fill the gaps. More problematically I think is that Long Covid is going to have a very long lasting impact on the NHS, that loss of talent is not likely to be able to return, its been 3 years now this is not a condition that resolves in most people so we desperately need to start funding real biological research.
So yes a lot of people are off with stress but the stressors are still Covid related.
You do all you can but it is still never enough and the workload has only increased. We are expected to do more with less and then blamed when we cannot work miracles. Those who think we are over-exaggerating are welcome to come and show us how it is done, we would very much welcome your expertise.
It’s been an incredibly shit few years from the average person in this country.
Between the lockdowns, cost of living, and having to see our spiteful government screw us over every day, it’s no surprise that millions of people are getting sick.
16 comments
Everything is so stressful these days. When are we going to relax?
You can wear PPE to minimise Covid transmission.
You can’t wear shit to stop shit hitting you left right and centre. That’s how stress overcomes you, kick you when you’re already down.
The Government kept underfunding for over a decade, the local Trust has to run with the bear minimal. Is it a little wonder we’re at this point today?
So under payed, understaffed and over worked dtaff results in stress, sickness, and resignations. This, even on purely economic grounds is a very long way from optimal. It’s not surprising it costs more to provide a worse service and this is compounded by a most unsupportive Gov’t. A Gov’t whose score for building new hospitals is 0 from the 40 they promised.
The NHS has been in crisis for as long as I can remember but you get the feeling that things are really starting to come to a boil now. Longer Ambulance wait times, GPs becoming inaccessible, rolling strikes. The Tories wanted it to fail and that’s exactly what’s happening. Trouble is, they’ve got no solution to fix it. There’s no money to be made for Virgin or Kaiser or whoever else because we’ve got money to give them.
I work in admin for the NHS, and we have had loads off with stress this past year
any work that requires you to go full speed all day every day will have massive absences due to stress and burn out. these people will be out from working for longer than the time you saved by having them going full speed so you create a vicious cycle of burn out even when you have more staff than you need since people are burned out.
NHS frontline staff raise issues such as increased patient demand/lack of resource/low pay but instead of these issues being seen as system wide problems, they are individualised and and a managerial emphasis is instead put on ‘staff wellbeing’, mindfulness webinars and individual staff being asked what they can do to make things better.
As a result the real source of the stress (increased demand, poor nursing pay, falling real terms spending per head on healthcare) is never addressed but managerial figures can suggest they have ‘done something’ to address the problem by suggesting staff ‘take care’ of themselves through wellbeing initiatives.
In my view this reflects a broader malign trend in the UK where social, economic or political problems are individualised and the real source of the problem is unaddressed.
For example, if you have have low pay, you must be the problem and work harder? if you feel depressed, its not because you live in poor housing, its your thinking thats the problem!
Worst idlers in the world, according to Liz Truss and her gang of morons.
Its everywhere
Not one part of the public sector has come out of the pandemic working anywhere near as well as they did beforehand. Statutory Sick Pay tends to concentrate the mind out here in the real world.
Can confirm. The amount of times I’ve been chewed out by NHS staff for asking basic questions or basic follow up when clearly someone on their end fucked up (yes, I was only politely asking). Only a burnt out person on edge can lash out at a parent asking politely the first time about their childs appointment. Turns out they couldn’t copy a phone number from the letter to their system right and overrode all contact information. Or when they dropped me from their patient list behind my back because they overrode my address due to another clerical mistake and sent the letters to some rando in another town altogether. Decades of orchestrated shitfuckery. Just pay and staff them enough, it ain’t hard and everyone is better off in turn.
I’m guessing that’s not even the real figure. How many people took days because of stress but felt they’d need to give a more physical reason for being off?
This is the problem with having everything running at 110% all the time. We treat public sector staff in such an inhumane manner, tell them they can’t complain unless they’re also earning below minimum wage etc. etc. we’ve all seen it countless times at this point.
What I don’t understand is why? Why do people suddenly seem to think *doctors and nurses* of all people aren’t incredibly hard workers who probably should not be being made every hour God sends for a barely-average salary?
Not just the impact it is having on current staff, but looking forwards to the future how are we going to replace them? Medicine was always supposed to be for the best and brightest. Which of our best and brightest aged 16 today are looking at the NHS and thinking fuck yeah I’m going to put myself in for all the placements and push myself super hard to get A*-everything so I can spend 5+ years and £50,000 on a medicine degree to make myself eligible for a job that will literally make me ill from overwork and stress while paying me a *fraction* of what every other English speaking country would pay me?
Not that surprising if you’ve seen what’s happened over the last couple of years. It’s not just the NHS either, all the related services and agencies too. From government departments, to local authorities, to care homes staff, to cleaners and suppliers , everyone is burnt out. Everything has been straining at the seams for 3 years, experienced staff are retiring or changing industries to get away and newcomers are put off quickly and leave again. No one has time for training, development, personnel management, forward planning or even just looking after themselves. The NHS and related systems would probably have already collapsed in it wasn’t for the amount of unpaid overtime that people put in.
Covid is also behind a lot of that. Covid causes significant absences with illness and that ramps up the workload on those that remain. Frontline healthcare workers are the hardest hit group in the country by Long Covid which means a lot of people who can’t work or working reduced hours and can’t do certain tasks all resulting in more pressure on the remaining able bodied staff. Combined all that with a massive increase in workload from Covid, Flu and RSV that weren’t there in prior years and its a soup for being overloaded.
The big problem which can not be resolved is you can’t just magic up healthcare staff. Every country has significant strain on their healthcare system from the same pressures and the NHS started out less prepared than most so its fairing worse than the others but there isn’t a big sea of doctors and nurses to be pulling from to fill the gaps. More problematically I think is that Long Covid is going to have a very long lasting impact on the NHS, that loss of talent is not likely to be able to return, its been 3 years now this is not a condition that resolves in most people so we desperately need to start funding real biological research.
So yes a lot of people are off with stress but the stressors are still Covid related.
You do all you can but it is still never enough and the workload has only increased. We are expected to do more with less and then blamed when we cannot work miracles. Those who think we are over-exaggerating are welcome to come and show us how it is done, we would very much welcome your expertise.
It’s been an incredibly shit few years from the average person in this country.
Between the lockdowns, cost of living, and having to see our spiteful government screw us over every day, it’s no surprise that millions of people are getting sick.