COVID-19: Guide to Staff Burnout Management (1)

As a senior health ministry and hospital management (equivalent of National Health Service in the UK) leader, you must manage staff wellbeing – this is your primary job. If you don’t do this, how on earth are you going to deliver? Here is a guide to help manage staff burnout effectively during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. First, we’ll learn the basics which covers the problem TODAY. Then later on, we’ll cover the mid and long-term problems.

Today, you have a problem, which is – “your clinical and non-clinical staff are burning out”. What tools are available to you? They are:

• Rest
• Recovery
• Reserves
• Rotation
• Rehabilitation

REST: This is a “same day” tool. It includes mandatory breaks, somewhere to go for a sandwich or snack in peace, or with colleagues. Now, take a walk through your working environment (facility, institution) and ask, where can staff go to escape for a while? Does your lower tier management understand the importance of working day breaks? Do they take such breaks? Answer these questions honestly and work with your responses to create 30mins – 1 hr mandatory breaks in between work hours and shifts for your staff.

RECOVERY: When was the last time every staff member had a day off? Some health system and facility staff took no holidays in 2020. It’s unsustainable to not have any time or day(s) off work. Also, encourage people to “mute” WhatsApp groups on their days off . This is an important tool in your locker, and one that many managers won’t enforce because it may leave them “short-staffed” or “damage their stats”. Your alternatives are; Do something to get people day(s) off or Permanently burnout your staff and they’re off anyway. The choice is yours, choose wisely.

RESERVES: This is something best done in advance, but it’s not too late to start doing it. What happens if a clinician calls in sick, how do you replace them? What happens if your reception staff all go off ill? How you manage this is the heart of “good operations management”. If you have no plan B for when someone calls in sick, then you’re chasing the game. Hence, have reserves in mind for “if” and “when” you hit a worst-case scenario. You can readily use short-term overworking to compensate for an emergency, but it can’t be a continuous state of operations. Think and plan ahead for every worst-case scenario.

ROTATION: Can you shift someone to a less stressful role for a while? For example, Chief resident and Chief HO roles can be rotated from time to time Or an emergency nurse moved to administrative role and vice versa for a short while. Let them recover within normal hours of work for a while. Anyone who pretends they can run at 100% for a long time is wrong and will only cause harm. This is a tough one to do in real life but bear it in mind! Simply, do not overwork your health care workers, be intentional and creative about their work hours.

REHABILITATION: (This is for action TODAY; longer-term rehabilitation will be covered later on) How do you help obviously drained and damaged people? How do you target interventions to stop people from breaking down mentally and physically? How do you enable staff to spot other people breaking? How can staff family members’ and friends contact you to tell you of their worries concerning your staff? What support can you offer them? This is effectively mental health first aid and is critical given the length of this pandemic. Stop and think this point through thoroughly.

In Summary, these 5 areas are guides to help you deal with TODAY’s problems of staff burnout across all levels, facilities and institutions in the health system. We do hope that you make use of this guide to refine your facility specific-fashioned plan, to avoid ending the pandemic with a workforce fundamentally burned out and unfit to deal with the non-COVID workload.

TODAY’s problems can not be left out, likewise, you must also shift your concentration and look out for TOMORROW. If you can not do these, then you’re probably in the wrong job as a senior health management leader, or you are too deep down in your own rabbit hole. Look up for the sake of your people.

… to be continued