Surviving Work in Healthcare
Today we are launching a free online resource Surviving Work in Healthcare designed for people working on the frontline. The website is a joint project by Surviving Work and the Tavistock & Portman NHS Foundation Trust offering podcasts, videos and survival guides that take a jargon free, de-stigmatizing and practical approach to addressing the real problems of working in healthcare. The resources take as their starting point the crisis of healthcare in the UK. Impossible targets managed through command and control management and a stomach-churning rise in racism, whistleblowing and victimisation in the NHS. In response to the increasingly precarious system of employment relations in healthcare, these resources use the ‘ordinary’ expertise and experiences of people who are actually surviving work. The podcasts and videos are divided into ten core themes:
- Bullying at work: Why healthcare has an culture of bullying and why we are all involved
- Healthy Organisations: What makes workplaces sick and why we can't stop getting ill
- Understanding Healthcare: What are the systemic factors that shape healthcare delivery?
- Precarious Work: The realities of working conditions and wages in healthcare
- Precarious Workers: What happens to us when we work in precarious jobs
- Dynamics in Groups: Why working with other people makes us anxious
- Racism: Why discrimination happens everyday in healthcare
- Managing Healthcare: How to manage dysfunctional teams and survive the process
- Team working: Why team working is the only show in town
- Solidarity in healthcare: How to make friends and influence people at work
Our ethos is based on a relational model of work that takes as given that to survive work we all need to build our relationships with the people around us. We have developed these resources to be used on the frontline of health care. We hope that you can use them in your activities, meetings and trainings. Just send the link www.survivingworkinhealth.org to anyone you think would find them useful. These resources are free - all we ask is that you respect the copyright and attribute the resources to the authors when you use them. Surviving Work in Healthcare will not make you happy or rich but it will help you to survive work.