“As soon as the second wave ended, I had nightmares, panic attacks, insomnia, mood swings. My personal life was falling apart. I had suicidal thoughts, ”says Joan Pons Laplana, ex-nurse of the NHS, the British health system.
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This 46-year-old Catalan, who has lived for two decades near Sheffield, in the north of England, had already burned out before the pandemic. Intense work pressure during the waves of COVID-19 caused him, like thousands of other NHS workers, to quit to protect his mental health.
Some 33,000 NHS medical staff quit between July and September 2021, including nearly 7,000 in search of a better life balance, according to official statistics. That’s nearly double the last quarter of 2019, just before the pandemic.
The long shifts, the stuffy equipment, the risk of catching the virus and contaminating his wife or children, exhausted the ex-nurse.
“I saw a patient of my age say goodbye on an electronic tablet to his daughter who was the same age as mine. Moments later he was dead. I started dreaming about the patient’s eyes at night. My therapist diagnosed me with post-traumatic syndrome,” he recalls.
Joan left one day in the middle of a service meeting and never came back. He now works for a job access program for young handicapped or disadvantaged people.
Akshay Akulwar has not yet resigned from his post as a surgeon in the east of England, but he is wondering about leaving to work elsewhere: New Zealand, Australia, where the salaries are better, or even his country of origin. origin, India.
He denounces the accumulation of long shifts. “Slowly it is impacting your well-being, your availability for your family. We begin to feel the burn-out, to work less efficiently”, without knowing until when it will be necessary to hold, explains the one who is also spokesperson for the Association of Doctors of the United Kingdom.
According to a survey by the Unison union, more than two-thirds of medical workers suffered a burnout during the pandemic and more than half worked beyond their contractual hours. Result: more than half of the sector’s employees are looking for a new job.
“The NHS was already short of around 100,000 people before the coronavirus”, after a decade of austerity. “The pandemic has increased the pressure on medical workers and many are tired of it,” insists Sara Gorton, a manager at Unison.
Faced with the lack of arms aggravated by the Omicron variant, several hundred soldiers were deployed as reinforcements in hospitals and ambulance services.
Bill Palmer, from the Nuffield Trust think tank, notes a growing trend of resignation since 2016, but which came to a halt during the first year of the pandemic: “People felt they had to hold on and it was harder to find a job elsewhere.
He notes that for six months resignations have started to rise again. Some leave because of the obligation to vaccinate in retirement homes or certain specialized care establishments, but many highlight the pressure in permanently understaffed services or a feeling of not being valued.
Alex, a psychiatric nurse – he does not want to give his full name – has seen his workload increase by 25% during the pandemic.
“I felt treated like a number. I started to feel depressed,” he told AFP.
He decided to retrain and now works for an organization that helps victims of modern slavery and domestic violence.
“I receive equivalent pay, but I experience less stress and my work is appreciated,” he says.
In lower-skilled medical professions, meager pay adds to the incentive to leave, while other understaffed sectors, such as distribution, raise wages.
Brexit complicates the situation, because those who resign from the NHS, where many foreigners work, are more difficult to replace due to more complex and costly migration procedures.
Whatever their reason, these resignations aggravate the delays in care accumulated by the health system: they reach record levels and weigh on the chances of survival in the event of accidents or serious illnesses.
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