4 Looking after yourself
An important aspect of your demanding role in healthcare is to look after yourself, so that you keep physically and mentally healthy. Work-related stress is defined by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE, 2015) as ‘the adverse reaction people have to excessive pressures or other types of demand placed upon them’.
Most people would agree that a certain amount of pressure is tolerable, even enjoyable. Different people, of course, react in different ways to pressure. Some people tolerate more than others do. But we are often at our best when the adrenalin is flowing and when we are working under pressure to achieve good results within a limited time. Problems start when the pressure becomes too great or continues for long periods. It then becomes stress. It ceases to be enjoyable. In the UK employees are absent for an average of eight days a year, and in 2013 stress, grouped with depression and anxiety, was the fourth major cause of absence in the UK (ONS 2014). The five main causes of work-related stress that CIPD identified were:
- workload
- management style
- relationships at work
- organisational change and restructuring
- lack of employee support from line managers.
Activity 5
3 Your personal development