A new academic study released in Peterborough on Thursday outlines the impact of working conditions on the mental health of health-care workers in publicly funded facilities.
The study stresses the need for investment, legislation and support according to the study’s lead author James Brophy, a professor at Athabasca University, whose research focuses on occupational and environmental health.
Brophy outlined the key findings of the study during a news conference on Thursday at the Peterborough Public Library. He was joined by president of the Ontario Council of Hospital Unions (OCHU) Michael Hurley, who was a co-author of the study.
The qualitative study, entitled “Running on Empty: Ontario Hospital Workers’ Mental Health and Well-Being Deteriorating Under Austerity Driven System” was released this week and was published in the academic journal “New Solutions: A Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy.”
The OCHU news conference comes two days after Ontario Premier Doug Ford joked during the opening of a new animal hospital in King City, north of Toronto, “we know where we can send the overflow patients now for MRIs and CT scans and everything else.”
Ford’s statement has been widely criticized by opposition party members in the legislature with Liberal and NDP leaders calling out Ford’s plan to privatize health care in the province while dismantling the public sector.
Among the recommendations arising from the paper include increased funding alongside more staffing, higher wages, equitable workloads and a means of protecting health-care workers, the majority of whom are female, from workplace violence and harassment.
The finding of the increasing levels of violence being experienced by health-care workers, 85 per cent of whom are women, was one of the most eye-opening findings in this and previous studies, according to Brophy.
“What we heard in this, which surprised me, is that the health-care workers we talked to said that the incidents of violence and stress, distress and suffering have increased,” Brophy said, mentioning the issue of violence has become more prominent in the public discourse and academic literature since the COVID-19 pandemic.
The study itself consists of 26 interviews with health-care workers across the province, including nurses, clerical staff and sanitary workers employed in hospitals of varying size. The identities of the workers were protected by ethics board protocols set forth at the University of Windsor, where co-author Margaret M. Keith is a professor of sociology and criminology.
Key findings of the report indicate health-care workers in the province are experiencing a broad range of negative impacts on their mental health. The study notes the hospital workers interviewed “expressed dissatisfaction, stress, despair, sorrow, distrust, anger and frustration” in their present conditions with many noting they are being treated for mental health conditions such as anxiety.
Chronic understaffing across the province, overwork and low wages in comparison to private sector or agency nurses are cited as being key contributors to the decline in the overall mental health of health-care workers and are leading to burnout across the sector and what the study refers to as moral distress or moral injury.
Moral distress refers to the inability of health-care workers to carry out their tasks with the same level of care and attention or pride in the work that they do. This causes a moral dilemma in the ways in which they can carry out their work to the best of their abilities as a result of the overall working conditions.
One nurse interviewed for the study revealed they “were not even proud to be a nurse anymore.”
Another palliative care nurse indicated “They spread me so thin I don’t have the time to provide the level of care I would love to provide.” They are quoted in the study as saying, “With the issues we have at work and the concern about patient neglect and the physical part of the job is so draining …(sic) my job is killing me.”
According to the study, this kind of moral injury for workers impacts on patient care in a number of ways, including an increasing exodus from the health-care sector.
“What this study shows is that there’s a significant risk of large numbers of people who are working in hospitals, leaving really in despair,” Hurley told media on Thursday. “This isn’t just an issue for the workers. This is an issue for the population who want to get into hospital and get care (who) doesn’t want to be on a stretcher (and) doesn’t want to be waiting for a long time.”
The collaboration between OCHU and the academics allowed for a greater degree of access to the health-care workers, Brophy explained.
“I don’t see how we could have done this kind of research without this collaboration,” he said. “It’s been unbelievable from an academic point of view — an unbelievable partnership — to allow us to do this work and give us access to people that are trusting us because they trust their union.”
