It's Time We Stopped Blaming NHS Staff For Burnout – We Need Structural Change

Nurse in ward corridor“NHS staff are absent from work due to illness at twice the national average, costing the NHS £12.1 billion a year,” Dr Cath Taylor, professor of healthcare workforce organisation and wellbeing at the University of Surrey, tells HuffPost UK. The professor is a co-principal investigator of a five-year project, led by the University of Surrey, to help address the “unacceptable” rates of stress, trauma, and burnout among health and social care workers. Supported by a £5 million grant from the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), the researchers will work alongside NHS trusts and other universities to shift the responsibility of staff’s mental health from individual health or social care workers to the NHS as a whole.So, we thought we’d ask Dr Taylor and Dr Jill Maben, co-principal investigator of the project and professor of health services research and nursing at the University of Surrey, about what that might look like.The researchers don’t think mindfulness courses are the answer Researchers have been looking into why NHS workers’ mental health has been suffering for “decades,” the experts say. And while the university’s most recent research – the Care Under Pressure Programme – suggests the causes of “poor psychological well-being” are systemic and need organisation-level solutions, both professors think this isn’t the approach the NHS is taking at the moment.“The research has remained ‘individual’ focused – recommending for example resilience or mindfulness courses” for staff struggling under system-wide pressures.“There is a need for a step-change approach to tackling this challenging issue,” they say.As a part of their Care Under Pressure 2 study, the researchers spoke to NHS health and social care staff who had worked in the institution during Covid. “Many of their stories stuck with us, including those who said they would never forget the deaths of some patients and colleagues in Covid and who said they were forever altered,” both principal investigators said.“They needed to support each other and talk together to process the challenges of their work.”The first 18 months of the project will be spent working out what the research needs to focus on most, and how information can be collected and shared so that staff (including those often left out of large-scale discussions) are included.“We will be working in true partnership with NHS frontline staff” When I asked how the researchers planned to balance their changes against the NHS’s material challenges (like long hours and low pay), both professors gently corrected me. “The first critical point to note is that these will not be ‘our’ changes (the research team) but we will be working in true partnership with NHS frontline staff and managerial leaders to determine what to implement, how, when and for whom,” they write. The research, which began on 1 March this year and will continue ’til 2030, “enables us to bring together the best evidence and academic expertise, with clinical frontline expertise, including a goal to grow research knowledge and capability within the NHS to enable sustainability beyond our project.”“It will be critically important to identify interventions that can be implemented and sustained despite the material challenges faced by the NHS currently, and our partnership approach – ensuring co-design of the solutions – will enable us to do this,” they continue.Help and support:Mind, open Monday to Friday, 9am-6pm on 0300 123 3393.Samaritans offers a listening service which is open 24 hours a day, on 116 123 (UK and ROI - this number is FREE to call and will not appear on your phone bill).CALM (the Campaign Against Living Miserably) offer a helpline open 5pm-midnight, 365 days a year, on 0800 58 58 58, and a webchat service.The Mix is a free support service for people under 25. Call 0808 808 4994 or email [email protected] Mental Illness offers practical help through its advice line which can be reached on 0808 801 0525 (Monday to Friday 10am-4pm). More info can be found on rethink.org.Related...The Mental Healthcare System Is Leaving Autistic Women BehindDr Zoe Williams: We Need New Ways To Ask Black Mums About Their Mental HealthA Mental Health Game Asked 10,000 Kids What Makes Them Anxious – Here’s What They Said

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