Caring for ourselves as well as we care for our patients
The importance of safe and healthy workplaces for healthcare providers
S tress, burnout, and physical injury are far too prevalent in healthcare. For example, a 2007 study from the International Council of Nurses found that 41 per cent of hospital nurses were dissatisfied with their jobs and 22 per cent planned to leave them in less than one year.
As Ontario’s Assistant Deputy Minister for health human resources, it is my job to ensure that Ontarians have access to healthcare providers, now and in the future. It takes up to six years to train a nurse, and as many as 12 to train a physician, so we need to ensure that our nurses, doctors, and allied health professionals stay in their jobs and continue delivering first-class care to patients.
Fostering healthy work environments is one way to accomplish that goal. There is mounting evidence of a significant correlation between healthy, supportive work environments and worker retention and job satisfaction. That’s why we’ve introduced several healthy work environments initiatives under the HealthForceOntario strategy. An overview of the projects were working on with our partners is available at www.healthforceontario.ca under Hot Topics.
The good news is that our health care professionals are telling us that that they want to continue delivering quality care and making meaningful contributions to patients’ lives. The end of mandatory retirement presents us with an opportunity to find innovative ways to accommodate our senior workers so that we can benefit from their years of experience.
Patients benefit too. The work of researcher Graham Lowe and others show us that healthy work environments can improve outcomes and quality of care.
That said, there are a couple of things we need to keep in mind as we work towards creating healthier work environments in Ontario:
1. We need to monitor and measure the impact of our initiatives. We can use indicators that include absenteeism and overtime and lost-time injuries to assess our progress and identify where it is that we still need to improve.
2. Leadership is crucial to our success. We need leaders at all levels, from the units on the floor to executive suite, to send the message that unhealthy work environments are unacceptable.
The bottom line is this:
No one should be jeopardizing their own health to look after the health of others. We all benefit -- providers, patients and the system -- when we care for ourselves as well as we care for our patients.
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