A Personal Perspective: The pursuit of psychological safety.
. Hospitals and administrators now face a pivotal question: How do we sustain and retain our workers? Our primary focus always must be to protect and safeguard the workforce. Without such a top-down directive and a mechanism to support it, at some crucial point, the healthcare system will collapse. These aren’t just jobs and professional careers; people’s lives are at stake, and that means all of us.
Fundamentally, if one does not feel safe at work, nothing else matters. Compensation, location, collegiality, and workload all pale in comparison with personal safety. As we have seen with COVID and its permutations, an ample supply of personal protective equipment is vital when treating patients: gowns, gloves, and N95 masks, in addition to face shields and goggles in some cases.
In a hospital, a sentinel event can be just as debilitating to staff and care providers as to the patient. The workplace no longer feels safe. The emotional toll such events may produce is exacerbated by the cycle of nonstop reactivity: in essence, we are putting a Band-Aid over a serious wound as a salve until the next grievous injury. Psychologically, that puts us in an unsafe space.
In the absence of routine messaging, a worker who experiences a threat to safety can feel isolated in that moment. That sense of aloneness—where the silence can be deafening—may easily turn to fear. Our leaders need to be on the lookout for telltale signs of emotional detachment: uncommunicative states, disjointed focus, or the person appears withdrawn. Reassuring our workers that they are not alone, by keeping open communication, greatly helps to relieve.
Listening too is important. The hospital front line is where solutions exist, with expertise and perspective from the trenches. Policies and protocols decided at the uppermost levels come with risks if administrators are in any way detached from the daily goings-on of our workers. As we saw with the pandemic, issues evolve quickly and the nature of a threat can rapidly morph; at that point, communications up and down the line at each level need to be strong.
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