NHS Workers’ Mental Health: The “One-Size-Fits-All” Approach Must End

Photo credit: Depositphotos

By Joel Gujral, Founder of MYNDUP

NHS frontline workers have provided consistency, reliability and excellence over the past eighteen months as the pandemic put unprecedented stresses on them as individuals, and hospitals in general. But the long hours they’ve worked, the stresses they’ve encountered and the emotional turmoil they’ve experienced has undoubtedly and understandably had an impact on their mental health.   

The issues they are facing are very real: the 2020 NHS Staff Survey results revealed that more than 44% felt unwell due to stress in 2020, with 26.5% often thinking of leaving and 20% actively looking for a new job. What’s more, mental health services set up for NHS staff in the wake of Covid were accessed almost 800,000 times between March 2020 and March 2021.

Workplace mental health gets much more attention today than it once did, which shows how much progress has been made. However, the support on offer to healthcare workers is still lacking, focusing generally on a “one-size-fits-all” approach rather than something that caters to the individual needs of each person. This issue needs to be tackled if we are to build a happy, fulfilled NHS workforce in the long term.

Tailoring approaches to meet individual needs 

In many walks of life, employees now have access to some form of mental health support should they need it. While any assistance – especially for NHS staff – is welcome, it won’t help properly address issues if support isn’t personalized. We are all unique, so we cannot rely on generic approaches to our own mental health.

Consider the entire mental health spectrum and how diverse it is. Someone suffering from anxiety is not the same as someone suffering from depression. Similarly, a worker looking for help to address emotional trauma is not the same as an employee looking for life coaching to boost their confidence and self-esteem. If the workplace mental health support on offer simply covers, for example, basic therapy or counseling, it will only work for a small proportion of employees.

This is something I’ve experienced myself in my own working life. A few years ago, I spent eight months in and out of hospital with an undiagnosed physical illness, which took a severe toll on my mental health. I reached out to occupational health at my corporate company, but experienced this “one-size-fits-all” approach first hand. It was only when I found a fantastic life coach through my own independent research that I managed to turn my life around.

Recent research also bears this out further. A survey of working adults across a range of industries with children of school age found that 54% want their employers to introduce specific mental wellness days, with this figure increasing to 59% for female respondents.

Offering a variety of services 

Any support program should be put together with all of the various mental health challenges in mind, so HR staff and NHS leaders must take the time to fully understand what these are and take action. To cover all the bases, the types of support offered should be numerous, ranging from therapy and counseling, through to other services such as psychology, life coaching, careers guidance and meditation.

Each member of staff should have the freedom to find and pick a service that suits them, before embarking on a course that helps them to achieve their goals. The key is providing the flexibility and choice that traditional mental health services often lack, instead of forcing someone to speak to someone they don’t know without having the option to vet a practitioner themselves.

Perhaps most importantly of all, these services should be available free-of-charge to both NHS staff and the trusts that they work for. Healthcare employees work hard for us, so we should be willing to return the favor.

Looking after healthcare worker’s mental health 

The pandemic has, more than any other event in living memory, affirmed to us that our healthcare workers should never be taken for granted. Every single NHS employee should feel empowered and fulfilled in their roles, as a happy employee is a productive one. After all, it is no coincidence that every £1 spent on employee mental health offers an average return of £4.

Mental health is one of the most critical components in achieving this, especially for people working on the front lines of a health crisis. If we work hard to expand the range of support on offer to them, it will pay dividends in the long run. We’ve been tasked as a nation with protecting the NHS since Covid-19 first struck: let’s now do something truly meaningful to improve their wellbeing.