As a result of the pandemic, doctors and nurses are becoming burnt out at much higher rates than ever before. But even prior to the pandemic, healthcare professionals would fall into burnout from time to time.
Truthfully, healthcare is a difficult field to be in, as employees are exposed to challenging situations each day. If you work in healthcare management, you do play a role in helping your staff avoid burnout. While you cannot alleviate every difficult circumstance and emotional effect your staff will face, there are some steps you can take to help them avoid burnout.
Promote Vacation Time
Vacation time should be a non-negotiable in your employees’ lives, meaning that you should ensure that they are taking paid vacation time throughout the year. Traveling is a key way to avoid burnout, and it has been proven that those who take their vacation time return to work much more rejuvenated to complete the tasks requested of them. Your staff will feel valued when you encourage them to take vacation time.
Show Them Appreciation
While some job circumstances will be hard to fix, there are ways you can show your support and appreciation for your staff even while they deal with difficult situations. This could look like giving everyone a free lunch, creating department competitions, appointing a therapist to the hospital, or even decorating the hallways for the holidays. Burnout often leads to a loss of motivation, but showing this sort of appreciation for your staff will help bring back some of the motivation they have lost.
Provide Additional Health Benefits
Burnout also takes a toll on one’s health, leading to unhealthy eating, no motivation to exercise, and the loss of sleep. In order to combat these effects, you can put some of your organization’s budget towards health-based initiatives. This might include sponsoring workout classes, sending out healthy recipes and tips to your employees and providing healthy on-site food vendors. Rather than leaving your staff to fall behind in their health, you can promote healthy habits from their workplace.
Address Burnout
Some people enter the healthcare field not ever having experienced burnout or even knowing what it is. Even though this topic is being discussed more frequently nowadays, it is still a shunned topic in many communities. It is important that your healthcare organization addresses burnout early on, implementing it in training sessions and bringing in an occasional expert to speak on the topic. By educating your staff on burnout, you can help them identify early warning signs, which may allow them to put certain practices in place to avoid it altogether.