After the pandemic’s emergence, healthcare workers’ mental health has been significantly affected. Our healthcare professionals have experienced an increase in the influence of anxiety, depression, loneliness, and several other mental health issues.
However, the healthcare industry management is now facing adverse effects of the pandemic in their staff, especially frontline fighters.
Consequently, healthcare executives demand appropriate resources to help workers cope with their mental health issues due to overwhelming stress. Our Employee Engagement Experts provide tips on how healthcare executives can better care for their workers’ mental health and well-being.
Different surveys conducted by research centers clearly explain the negative impact of stress and workload on their employees’ mental health.
From this percentage, nearly 13% of frontline healthcare workers are accessing mental health services or medications. In contrast, 18% of them didn’t seek any essential services due to high costs and stigma surrounding their mental health and well-being.
Besides, heavy workloads, long night shifts, job insecurity, and lack of social support have impacted stress among healthcare professionals. However, all these challenges also have a negative impact on providers’ professionalism, quality of care delivery, and service efficiency.
Here we are going to guide you with some valuable strategies that can help you improve the mental health and well-being of your healthcare staff.
Causes of Mental Health and Wellbeing Worsening in Healthcare Professionals
There are several reasons that have highly impacted the mental health of healthcare workers around the world. On top of all, here are a few of the major causes that influence the mental health of every healthcare sector worker:
- Higher Layoff Rates
- Lack Of Appropriate Staff Resources
- Long Work Shifts And Excessive Amount Of Patients
- Limited Breaks And Interactive Sessions
- Lack Of Avenues To Address Personal Issues
Strategies to Improve Mental Health and Wellbeing of Healthcare Professionals
Investing in preventive and new working models can help you provide long-term solutions for reducing the burden and stress of healthcare workers.
1. Prevention Measures to Reduce Workload
The stress management interventions of the World Health Organization explain that healthcare workers experience elevated psychological stress and risk of burnout due to excessive workload burden.
Therefore, peer-to-peer support groups in a healthcare organization can give healthcare workers a chance to debrief their similar experiences. However, technology also greatly helps in this matter by engaging professionals and allowing administrators to appreciate efforts.
2. Fortify Workplace Culture and Administration
In the healthcare industry, opportunities to practice self-care should be recognized as necessary for preventing mental health issues and increasing motivation, job satisfaction, patient safety, and quality of care. All the health systems should establish appropriate parental and sick leave policies as well as limit the duration of work shifts.
In addition, the healthcare leaders must work toward normalization of discussions and appreciating those workers who are performing outstanding work. Moreover, normalizing discussions will also help monitor workers’ early signs of burnout, PTSD, and other mental health issues.
3. Measures for Improving Workers’ Mental Health
Organizing education campaigns to deliver awareness about the importance of workers’ mental health will play a key role in improving overall performance. Here are some easy practices you can use to better the mental health condition and well-being of your healthcare workers.
Thus, we should understand that taking care of workers’ mental health and well-being is essential not only during a public health crisis or pandemic but also regularly.
4. Give Zones To Relax
A large number of healthcare workers need to work around the clock due to overwhelming stress. In order, healthcare facilities should facilitate their workers with supplies to ensure they are well-rested, well-fed, and have some downtime.
You can also reward your workers with paid leaves to give them a break from continuous work pressure. Besides, the administration should take the initiatives to reward their around-the-clock workers with cafeteria coupons to motivate them.
These are a few primary initiatives that are perfect for healthcare workers to decompress and relax during high-stress days.
5. Appreciate Those Who Take Care of Themselves As Well As Patients
Whether it is healthcare professionals or nursing staff, it is crucial to make them feel appreciated, especially during those workload odds when it seems that they are going unnoticed. Being a good healthcare executive, you should ensure you are doing much more than just saying “Good job.”
Workers should genuinely feel that they are an essential part of the team and perform their job well. You can also encourage workers to appreciate their co-workers in long shifts to keep the spirit.
Do it All with BRAVO – A 360 Degree Employee Performance Management and Recognition Software.
A work-life balance is crucial for every worker of every discipline. Adapting BRAVO – an employee engagement and appreciation platform, will promote better interaction between healthcare staff and ultimately improve well-being.
Organizing award events for all your staff is challenging, especially when they do night shifts, but rewarding workers has multiple benefits. You can do it with BRAVO without bothering staff and their work shifts. Here is how you can do it with our employee engagement software:
- Gather Feedback from Workers about their Health: You can use BRAVO to share feedback forms digitally with your workers and learn about their health conditions and well-being. The intelligent insights help you get a quick overview of the present situation.
- Engage Healthcare Staff and Keep the Morale: BRAVO allows users to recognize and appreciate their co-workers directly. In this way, your healthcare staff can keep the spirit at the workplace by appreciating and motivating good initiatives.
- Reward and Appreciate Healthcare Workers: Just as we know, it is tough to meet all professional and nursing staff simultaneously as they are available only during their work hours. So, with BRAVO, you can recognize and appreciate the efforts of your staff regardless of their physical ability.
- Promote Breakouts and Healthy Meals: There are definitely those workers who go beyond everything to take the best care of patients without worrying about their health. So, to appreciate their dedication to work, you can give some paid leaves and healthy meal coupons. This way, you can make your staff feel valued and cared for.
The Bottom Line
As pandemics and other medical threats continue to plague hospitals worldwide, healthcare professionals should prioritize mental health and well-being. The hospital administration should make workers feel more comfortable discussing their mental health.
BRAVO is a simple way to improve healthcare professionals’ mental health and well-being. It helps healthcare organizations evaluate healthcare workers’ well-being and provide staff with the resources they need to reduce stress.
Try a free demo of BRAVO today!
