The mental load is breaking us
Not only are our patients presenting with more pre existing comorbidities, are more acutely unwell and more are presenting to our hospitals and our wards. We deal with the constant reminders that we are fully staffed and gaslighted with promises of brighter days.
Yet here we are.
We are pushed to discharge patients to clear our overflowing emergency departments.
Pushed to discharge enough patients for the days elective surgery lists.
Pushed to move our passed patients to the morgue to bring in the next.
Pushed to attend more education, told its mandatory but expected to squeeze it into our busy shifts or worse in our own personal time.
Pushed to attend followup phones calls yet we struggle to give patients personal cares.
And if that’s not bad enough.
We are harassed daily with calls, messages and requests for extra or overtime shifts. Our rostered days off are no longer ours to enjoy, as our personal phones are bombarded with messages of deficits and pleas to assist.
We are called in early, asked to stay late. Cornered in the hallways to swap our shifts only to see a message that they now need to cover the shift you swapped.
Our kids are going to bed without us, we are missing their lives. Our days off are playing catchup on housework that was left behind as we ran out the door a few hours earlier than rostered or was not done as we slept after we didn’t return home until the morning after our afternoon shift turned into an eighteen hour overnighter.
We squeeze in a catch up here or there. Our social lives no longer fit within our work lives. The balance between life and work has tipped to the latter. Our families miss us.
We lose ourselves as we give more and more of our time.
Our bank accounts don’t show how hard we work as after so much overtime the government reaches in and takes it back in taxes. All we have to show for our efforts are bags under our eyes, the aches of walking halls for days on end, the hunched shoulders from the weights of unfinished tasks, and the reminders of all the time we have lost.
And yet we are told we are coping.
We are told we are fully staffed and not working short.
We are treated as though we are replaceable as no incentives are provided to keep staff.
We shoulder the mental load of an underfunded, out of touch, broken system.