Burnout a reality for some Sault Area Hospital staff

Part of Sault Area Hospital’s ‘healthy, well and safe’ plan for its employees, outlined at Monday’s SAH board of directors meeting, was devoted to the issue of burnout felt by many hospital staff.

The hospital often operating at overcapacity, staff adjusting to new methods of dealing with that overcapacity and adapting to new information technology systems in healthcare are factors leading to burnout in some SAH staff, hospital administrators said.

However, Ila Watson, SAH interim president and CEO, said “I think it’s a bit of a leap to say staff are experiencing (total) burnout,” speaking to SooToday after Monday’s meeting.

Watson added cases of burnout are not unique to SAH, but in the healthcare sector in general.

While stress is a factor in all departments at SAH, the burnout tends to be in “the frontline, direct patient care,” said Kim Lemay, SAH interim vice president of transformation and chief human resources officer.

“That would include physicians as well,” Watson added.

“We have done a lot of work to better optimize our staffing, so one of the things that we believe to be a root cause of our higher sick time is the fact we haven’t done that as well as we might have and have learned a lot of things in the past number of months and are making changes so that’s being addressed,” Watson said.

That staff optimization, Lemay said, includes the hiring of over 50 full and (mostly) part time registered nurses (RNs) and a mix of over 30 full and part time registered practical nurses (RPNs) over the past six months.

“We’ve been able to close our vacancies within 90 days...we’re seeing our overtime come down,” Lemay said.

Responding to talk of SAH cutting more nurses, Watson said “that’s not accurate.”

Some SAH staff have also recently filed claims for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

“We have had claims this year for PTSD and the legislation changed about a year ago to include our ambulance workers as well as nurses, in that, if somebody puts in a claim for mental health or PTSD, the automatic assumption from WSIB is that it’s work related. So that is a change in the way WSIB approaches claims usually, so we have seen, in the last 12 months, PTSD claims that we had not seen previously,” Lemay said.

SAH administrators are consulting with staff on the burnout issue.

A ‘Burnout and Resilience’ session, held Oct. 24 and 25, included over 500 employees, volunteers and physicians.

“It was very well attended,” Lemay said.

“One of our strategies is just awareness. Part of addressing burnout is helping people become aware it’s impacting them and then giving them the supports they need to access the help,” Lemay said.

That support, Lemay said, includes training and information for staff and “relationship building with their peers, feeling like they’re part of a team...as we do our consultation with staff, physicians and volunteers, they’re going to come forward with those kinds of ideas and that’s going to be part of our ‘healthy, well and safe’ plan.”

Lemay said “we’ve done things like provide mental health first aid training to team leaders and others.”

Lemay said SAH might, moving forward, establish a ‘timeout’ program for its stressed employees, in which a staff member feeling the strain may take a break while a co-worker steps in to perform his/her task.

“If we look at the literature and some of the research we’ve done already, those kinds of programs are some of the newer things that hospitals are trying to do to support their staff, so I’m sure something like that will come out of this consultation with staff,” Lemay said.