October 10 is World Mental Health Day. This annual observance aims to raise awareness of mental health issues on a global scale and mobilize efforts to support mental health for everyone.
Making a difference starts at home and in our workplaces—and as a healthcare employer, it starts with you. What are you doing each day to support your team and ensure their ongoing good mental health?
Unique Challenges
Mental health doesn’t discriminate: it can affect workers in any industry. However, for healthcare professionals, there are often added challenges. Long shifts, nights, weekends, and holidays can be stiff barriers to work/life balance and make communication and engagement harder to achieve. Staff are often overworked, and burnout can quickly result.
Last but not least, especially in certain specialties, dealing with patients and loved ones in physical or emotional trauma is part of the job. Often, people’s lives are literally in your hands. One overtired provider, one erroneous dosage, and one slip-up can result in tragedy. It’s a huge load to carry.
Know the Signs
Even though they’re healthcare providers themselves, managers and supervisors may need reminders of the signs of stress, anxiety, or burnout in themselves and their team members. These include:
- Being irritated, angry, or in denial.
- Acting uncertain or nervous.
- Lacking motivation.
- Appearing to be helpless, tired, overwhelmed, sad or depressed.
- Having trouble concentrating.
If any of these symptoms are severe and long-lasting, this should raise a red flag that support and assistance are needed.
Every Step Helps
While there is no one-size-fits-all solution to solving mental health problems in the workplace, every step in the right direction helps. For instance:
- Make sure you have full leadership commitment. Your clinical and administrative leadership should openly discuss and encourage ongoing, two-way communication about the importance of mental health and how to maintain it. Equally important, they must walk the walk by sharing their own challenges and life experiences so no one feels alone in their struggles.
- Promote work/life balance. Discourage excessive overtime and promote the use of paid time off. Keep scheduling as flexible as possible. Designate quiet areas for relaxation and decompression during on-shift breaks.
- Provide continuing education. Regular mental health programming can help employees spot signs of mental health concerns early on and nip them in the bud. If you don’t already have one, form a wellness committee and include this on their regular agenda.
- Encourage regular manager check-ins. In addition to addressing work-related issues, ensure that ongoing manager check-ins include a discussion of employee well-being and a radar screen for any signs of mental stress.
- Offer crisis support. Develop clear crisis intervention plans and regularly reassess your employee assistance program to make sure proactive support and current, effective resources are readily available.
Better healthcare workers lead to better patient outcomes. Contact AlliedUP Co-Op today for more insight on keeping your workforce strong, including mental health tools tailored to your facility and its staff.
